Distinguished Women in Science: Professor Frances Arnold, Caltech

Distinguished Women in Science: Professor Frances Arnold, Caltech
Date
Mon April 17th 2017, 4:30pm
Event Sponsor
Chemistry Department
Location
Sapp Center Lecture Hall

Distinguished Women in Science: Professor Frances Arnold, Caltech, Sapp Center Lecture Hall, 4:30pm (Host: Ross Moretti)

About the Seminar:

"Biocatalysts for abiological chemistry: bringing new chemistry to life"

We make enzymes that catalyze reactions not known in living systems. Our approach to expanding nature’s catalytic repertoire is inspired by how nature innovates: new enzymes appear when the ‘promiscuous’ activities of existing proteins become useful for meeting new challenges or exploiting new opportunities. Mimicking this, we start with existing proteins (in my refrigerator or in databases) and identify catalytic activities that may be known to synthetic chemistry but that nature has not (yet) discovered, at least as far as we know.  Proteins with even very low levels of activity can become efficient new enzymes as we accumulate beneficial mutations by directed evolution.

We have found that heme proteins are a wonderful source of new biochemistry: engineered cytochrome P450s and other heme proteins catalyze a wide range of synthetically useful carbene and nitrene transfer reactions, from alkene cyclopropanation to Si-C bond formation to direct C-H amination. It’s fascinating to see how members of nature’s vast protein catalog can be evolved—with only a few mutations—to catalyze these reactions with high efficiency and selectivities. These results demonstrate the ease with which evolution can innovate. In the future these fully genetically-encoded catalysts may help access vast areas of chemical space that life has not explored.  

 

About the Speaker:

Frances Arnold is the Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry, and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, where her work focuses on protein engineering by directed evolution, with applications in energy, chemicals, and medicine.  Her laboratory pioneered enzyme evolution methods widely used in academic and industrial laboratories to create new protein catalysts. The recent focus is on creating new enzymes for abiological chemistry and expanding the catalytic repertoire of the biological world.

Dr. Arnold’s contributions have been recognized by the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research (2017), the Millennium Technology Prize (2016), the Eni Prize in Renewable and Nonconventional Energy (2013), and the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the US National Academy of Engineering (2011). She was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. She has also been elected to membership in all three US National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prof. Arnold has honorary doctorates from Stockholm University, the ETH Zurich, and the University of Chicago.

Dr. Arnold chairs the Advisory Panel of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowships in Science and Engineering program and serves as a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering. She holds more than 50 US patents and is active in technology transfer. Dr. Arnold received her BS in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley.