Font: UJI 30/11/2022
Specialists in computational chemistry, physics, engineering and biotechnology from all over the world will meet on 1 and 2 December 2022 in Villa Elisa during the 4th International Meeting on Trends in Enzymatic Catalysis (TrEnCa) organised by the Computational Chemistry Group and the Institute for Advanced Materials (INAM) of the Universitat Jaume I and coordinated by researchers Vicent Moliner and Katarzyna Patrycja Swiderek.
This international multidisciplinary congress, which includes the presence of the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Arieh Warshel, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Southern California, who will give the inaugural lecture, will address the latest advances in the study of enzyme catalysis and its applications, which can range from the design of artificial enzymes for use as catalysts in industry to the design of enzyme inhibitors.
The first of these applications has a great importance because they would allow chemical processes to be carried out in the industrial field but at low temperature, in mild conditions of the reactive medium and without secondary products, which means processes that are not harmful to the environment (this would be the case, for example, of a biological catalyst for the degradation of plastics on which work is currently being done).
The second group of applications is no less important because it could involve the design of molecules that can block enzymes involved in processes such as the replication of viruses like COVID or the synthesis of drugs that inhibit the replication of tumour cells.
The Israeli physicochemist Arieh Warshel gave the inaugural lecture of the Doctoral Programme in Science during his stay in Castelló this week. Under the title "From kibbutz ponds to Nobel Prizes", the professor explained how he came to research and his interest in understanding the catalytic power of enzymes and how he discovered that computer modelling could help him to advance in the study of whole molecules. This and other work helped him to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013, along with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus.
