Programme features

This 5-day course will bring together computational and experimental (bio)chemistry experts who will give comprehensive lectures on understanding and engineering enzyme catalysis. Hands-on practical sessions will be focused on how to use state-of-the-art software and webservers.
The focus areas are:

(i) Enzyme reactivity with EVB and QM/MM methods covered by Prof. Johan Åqvist, Prof. Lynn Kamerlin and Prof. Vicent Moline.

(ii) Molecular dynamics simulation as a tool in protein engineering covered by Prof Chris Oostenbrink

(iii) The EBI Enzyme Portal: a portal with enzyme resources, provided by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and beyond (including the AlphaFold dataset) to be covered by Dr Genevieve Evans

(iv) Computational tools for designing and engineering enzymes and de novo Protein Design covered by Dr. David Baker, Dr. Amijai Saragovi and Dr. Michael Heinzinger.

The focus topics will be complemented by lectures of Prof. Silvia Osuna “Fast Yet Accurate Computational Enzyme Design”, Prof. Derek Woolfson “From peptides to proteins to functions by design”, Assoc. Prof. Allesandro Pellis “Applications of enzymes for material science” and Prof. Uwe T. Bornscheuer “Enzyme engineering using directed evolution, rational design and machine learning for biocatalytic applications”

Students will be encouraged to work on their own research problems using their own laptops for working with the web-tools that will be covered in the tutorials. For some tutorials it could be required to install software on your laptop in order to be able to run a tutorial more efficiently. Please make sure that it is possible to install software on your laptop, in advance of the actual course event. Students will present and discuss their own research results during the poster session and short oral presentations. The programme will encourage interactions between students and lecturers and will provide opportunities to establish new professional relationships.

Course material will be provided via an on-line platform. At this platform, we will also have a shared document, accessible to all course participants, which can be used for asking questions related to the lectures and tutorials. The program includes discussion after every lecture and Q&A session covering the topics of all tutorials and lectures, respectively. The posters will be located in the coffee area and can also be discussed between the sessions.

Student flash presentations

Accepted participants will be asked to provide presentation for a two-minute talk (max 2 slides).