报告题目：Synthetic Polymer for Enzyme Catalysis

报告人：吴昌柱教授 (南丹麦大学)

报告时间：2024年6月17日（星期一）10:00-11:30

报告地点：五山校区25号楼346会议室

主办单位：材料科学与工程学院

报告人简介：

吴昌柱教授，2018年起任教南丹麦大学，是丹麦2019年国家杰出青年基金和2022年嘉士伯杰出青年基金的”获选者。吴教授博士毕业于柏林工业大学酶工程专业，长期从事“生物技术”的科学研究及工业化应用，尤其在酶催化领域，构建了多种新型材料对酶和全细胞进行定制版固定化及化学修饰，实现了绿色、经济、高效的催化效应。鉴于在“酶催化”领域的贡献，他于2015年获德国基金委（DFG）资助独立建组，至今作为独立负责人（Principal Investigator）主持了300多万欧元的科研项目，2018年受聘于南丹麦大学，2020被提升为终身教授，目前，他的课题组是化学系最大的科研团队。吴老师曾培养博士研究生十余人，长期支持博士生与校外合作课题组交流学习。课题组主要研究方向为生物催化，通过化学和材料学手段来修饰，组装具有催化功能的酶，最终实现高效的生物催化。吴老师课题组生物催化和蛋白化学研究取得一定科研成果，曾在Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, Chemistry of Materials, ACS Catalysis, Nature communications等著名期刊中发表相关论文50篇。此外，还担任丹麦化学会执行理事。

报告摘要：Enzyme catalysis has emerged as an indispensable tool in the industrial sector, offering environmentally benign alternatives to traditional chemical processes by utilizing enzymes and whole cells to catalyze chemical reactions. Despite its growing importance, the industry faces several considerable challenges: 1) narrow substrate scope of enzymes, and 2) the poor solubility of substrates in the reaction medium (water). These challenges make us difficult to use nature enzymes for many reactions of our interests.

We are working at the interface of polymer science and enzyme catalysis, focusing on combining polymers with enzymes for new-to-nature applications. Specifically, I will present a new approach to preparing artificial enzymes by combining proteins with catalytically active polymers, generating so-called “artificial polyenzymes” (ArPoly). Different from traditional artificial enzymes, ArPoly can be easily tailored for their structure, composition, catalysis loading, and active sites, which allows their high reactivity and new-to-nature selectivity. Furthermore, we developed enzyme-polymer conjugates and block copolymers as new type of emulsifiers for various emulsions for recyclable biocatalysis, which is particularly effective to reactions involving with nonpolar substrates. Recently, we even integrated supramolecular polymers with enzymes, creating supramolecular enzymes (SupEnzyme), which makes nature enzymes with supramolecular properties for industrial biotechnology.