09-732 Biocatalysis: Fundamentals, Recent Advances and Industrial Applications
6 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Biocatalysis is a rapidly developing field that utilizes naturally evolved and bioengineered enzymes as platforms to offer revolutionary solutions for chemical production. Modern biocatalysis relies on enzyme discovery, enzyme reaction mechanism elucidation, and high throughput screening processes for enzyme bioengineering. The recent established world's first academic cloud lab at CMU is a perfect remote-access and automated facility to be used to expand our research capacity into the biocatalysis area in both fundamental studies and biocatalytic platform development and engineering. This great research and educational opportunity calls for the development of courses to disseminate fundamental knowledge and practical skills related to biocatalysis to students so that the interested students could start engaging in this area of research. Thus, this proposed course, with the aim to introduce the field of biocatalysis in both academic studies and industrial applications, starts filling this gap. This course features an in-depth discussion of different topics in biocatalysis with examples of how biocatalysis has reshaped various aspects of modern industries including food, pharmaceuticals, consumer products and biomaterials industries. This course also provides an overview of common enzyme classes used in modern biocatalysis and their associated catalytic mechanisms and engineering. Hands-on experience of common bioinformatic and computational tools for new enzyme discovery will also be integrated into the course.
Prerequisites: (09-219 or 09-217) and (03-231 or 03-151 or 03-232 or 03-121)
Offered: Fall 2025
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