Enzyme design: watch this space?

I haven’t ever blogged publically before, but perhaps it is tradition to decide to do more than you’re actually able to do. Maybe that’s me right now.

I was revising my About page today, and what I wrote has me thinking. I have spare time, why not lay out a more rigorous enzdes method than what I hinted at? How do I know it’s the right way to do it? I can write the scripts up, test them out (I have a gaming PC with a RTX3090) and characterize the results computationally? Maybe posting a timeline of how someone learns how to do it, can help other decide that they want to try, too. Maybe they want to know how to apply the tools, and they need someone to guide them. And I always wanted to really practice doing enzyme design–I rotated in the Baker lab, but that was ten weeks. What else could I learn with more time?

I’d like to explore that question here, publically and copyleft. Perhaps that’s what I’ll use this blog section for: enzdes campaigns, and essays where I process the less intuitive concepts I’m learning about, as I hone my method. I’ll make use of a blend of computational tools, including the modern DL methods alongside some classical rule-based algorithms for filtering them.

Time will tell what this site becomes. But since I don’t have a wetlab at home to synthesize the genes and harvest the cultures, I can’t test any designs’ /actual/ performance in the lab. If you’d like to try them out, feel free! Maybe let me know how it worked by email.