Jordan Froese
Ball State University, IN·Biochemistry
Many drugs, fragrances and industrial chemicals contain aromatic groups, which are flat, ring-shaped arrangements of carbon atoms. Making these molecules usually takes many steps.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Chemistry
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
enzyme engineering
protein engineering
directed evolution
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Engineer variants of extradiol dioxygenases, aromatic peroxygenases and ferulic acid decarboxylases with expanded activity on aromatic compounds, using directed evolution platforms.
- Use AI-based protein modeling to select 6–10 residues lining each enzyme's substrate tunnel, the channel leading to its active site, where substitutions might stabilize binding of aromatic substrates.
- Build and screen large variant libraries in which tunnel residues are replaced with phenylalanine, tryptophan, tyrosine, histidine or methionine, which can stack against aromatic rings, to find more active enzymes.
- Test whether substrate tunnel remodeling is a broadly useful, generalizable enzyme engineering strategy across multiple aromatic-metabolizing enzyme families.
More about the research
Each step requires blocking every reactive site except the one being changed, then unblocking them afterward. Every round lowers the yield and adds energy use and solvent waste. Enzymes, the protein catalysts made by living things, can drive reactions more cleanly. However, natural enzymes often do not work well on the molecules chemists want to make. This project aims to engineer enzymes that react more efficiently with aromatic molecules.
Why it matters
Better enzymes for aromatic molecules could make it cleaner and cheaper to produce drugs, fragrances and chemicals, with fewer steps, less energy and less solvent waste. They could also help with bioremediation, the cleanup of pollutants. Showing that tunnel-reshaping works across three enzyme families could give protein engineers a general strategy for building new catalysts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xiongyi Huang
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Chemistry
Engineer metalloenzymes — proteins with a catalytic metal center — to perform C–H functionalization reactions absent from natural biology, installing chemical groups of biomedical relevance into organic substrates.
Seunghyun Sim
University of California-Irvine, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Build a high-throughput screen for enzyme activity using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, an instrument that sorts single particles by brightness, together with engineered chemical probes that fluoresce only when the displayed enzyme turns over its substrate.
Yunan Luo
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop machine learning methods that learn protein representations from amino acid sequence and 3D structure, in order to explain how composition and shape determine protein function.
The school
Ball State University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $13M a year on research, 52 research doctorates a year.
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