15
POPSEnzymes made to order Making enzymes is a tricky business. Even the names of the techniques sound mind-boggling, with the process involving a mix of 'quantum mechanical computation', 'advanced protein engineering' and 'directed evolution'. while naturally occurring enzymes speed reaction rates by many billion (or even trillion) fold, the synthetic enzymes gave more conservative boosts – around 100,000 fold. "The acceleration is really rather modest by comparison to Nature," admits Houk – but it's still incredibly exciting