W-BioCat - Heavy metal enzymes for sustainable industrial biocatalysis
Tungsten, the heaviest element in biology
Tungsten (or wolfram in German, hence the element symbol W) means “heavy stone” in Swedish. And it represents a truly heavy metal. Luckily it is not very toxic to humans, unlike other heavy metals like mercury or lead. You may know tungsten from the metal filament in old fashioned light bulbs. Tungsten is even a bio-element, as certain micro-organisms require it as an essential nutrient. In those micro-organism tungsten is used as a catalytic center in special metabolic enzymes. Humans do not use tungsten at all, however we use an element that is chemically very similar to tungsten, namely molybdenum.
Why is tungsten interesting for biotechnology?
Tungsten is used in enzymes as a metal cofactor which gives the enzyme special powers. Using tungsten the enzyme is able to catalyze chemical reactions that have very low redox potentials. Such reactions are important in industry, for example the conversion of CO2 to formic acid (for chemicals) or the conversion of carboxylic acids to aldehydes. Currently it is difficult to produce tungsten enzymes on a large scale, so they are not used at all in industry. We want to change that, by creating new bacterial expression systems that are suitable for large scale production of these enzymes. In order to do this we have to trick the industrial micro-organism into incorporating tungsten into the right enzyme, which it naturally does not do.
W-BioCat is a European research project
focused on the development of tungsten containing enzymes for application in a sustainable chemical industry. The project is a collaboration between Delft University of Technology, Jerzy Haber Institute of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry (Polish Academy of Sciences), University of Oxford, Weizmann Institute, University of Florence, HydRegen, and EvoEnzyme. Our goal is to advance the field of sustainable chemistry and contribute to a cleaner future.
Our Research Interests
Europe needs a sustainable chemical industry which will only be realized by new breakthrough technologies. Industrial biotechnology is established in chemical manufacturing, offering more efficient, more specific, safer and less energy demanding production, but is held back by the limited number of enzyme classes in industrial use. The new Pathfinder Open project W-BioCat funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) targets an important enzyme class of tungsten-containing enzymes (W-enzymes) which catalyse amazing chemical reactions involving challenging low redox potential reduction reactions, are currently impossible to obtain economically and on scale to match industrial needs. The goal of the project is to functionally express W-enzymes in an industrial workhorse micro-organism, as this would be a major breakthrough for the science and application of this enzyme class