Anna Zmich

CURRENT RESEARCH

Accelerating Biocatalysis via Enzyme Substrate Screening

Using enzymes for biocatalysis is cheap and an environmentally friendly way to access medicinal precursors or to make chemically relevant natural products. The main challenge with using enzymes is most can only perform their chemistries on a limited number of substrates. My research entails screening enzymes to use as potential biocatalysts and then using directed evolution to expand the substrate scope of these enzymes to create a wide variety of products. I am currently screening enzyme homologs that produce γ-substituted non-canonical amino acids.