Pharmaceutical scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a method that can measure the kinetic efficiency of an enzyme against more than 200,000 potential peptide substrates in a single experiment. 

Characterising the interactions between enzymes and their substrates is a fundamental task in biochemistry, essential for engineering new biocatalysts, understanding disease mechanisms, and designing therapeutics. While existing techniques can study many enzymatic reactions in parallel, scaling such methods to comprehensively analyse an enzyme's preferences across a vast space of possible substrates remains a practical challenge.

Assistant Professor Alexander Vinogradov from the NUS Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences has developed a strategy called DOMEK (mRNA-display-based one-shot measurement of enzymatic kinetics) that addresses this need.

Researchers at The University of Osaka and Kanazawa University have developed a novel method for analyzing cancer metabolism, revealing new insights into cancer's inefficient energy process. This breakthrough, published in Metabolic Engineering, combines biological experiments with advanced information science techniques to uncover the role of cancer-specific inefficient metabolism.