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  • RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

Machine learning matches enzymes with molecular substrates

An approach that identifies, and predicts compatibility between, chemical and enzyme-sequence spaces can streamline and reduce risk in the discovery of enzymes that can catalyse a desired reaction. The strategy uses high-throughput experiments to generate data about enzyme-mediated reactions, and there is a tool that can predict compatible substrate–enzyme pairs.
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This is a summary of: Paton, A. E. et al. Connecting chemical and protein sequence space to predict biocatalytic reactions. Nature 646, 108–116 (2025).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03161-x

‘Expert opinion’ is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence and Figure 1 is published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

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