Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, and bitBiome Inc., a biotechnology company unlocking the potential of our planet’s microbes to power the future of the bioeconomy, announced the launch of a joint Transaminase Enzyme Screening Kit, which is a curated collection of forty-eight highly diverse transaminase enzymes ready for in-house screening and evaluation.
Transaminase enzymes catalyze the transfer of an amine group from an amine donor. Importantly, transaminases have emerged as an exciting option for the synthesis of chiral amines, valuable building blocks for the pharmaceutical industry, offering a potential “green alternative” to conventional synthesis.
Pairing Twist Bioscience’s high-capacity synthesis technology with bitBiome’s one-of-a-kind proprietary database (bit-GEM) of over two billion microbe sequences enabled the creation of the innovative Transaminase Enzyme Screening Kit. This kit features a unique set of transaminases that can be used by labs and pharmaceutical companies to efficiently implement improved enzymes for biocatalysis, particularly for the synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Biocatalysis provides a viable alternative to conventional chemically synthesized processes used in the manufacturing of small molecule pharmaceuticals and other key ingredients.
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“We are delighted to work with Twist Bioscience to bring the wealth of relevant sequences in our bit-GEM database to not only the biocatalysis community but also the global biomanufacturing community,” said Yuji Suzuki, CEO of bitBiome. “Our companies have complementary strengths, with our database representing a highly diverse collection of sequences unknown to the public domain, and Twist’s capability of making large-scale DNA synthesis possible. We look forward to providing new and innovative solutions for the industry.”
“By mining bitBiome’s massive database and by identifying and synthesizing the enzymes that would be most useful in creating active pharmaceutical ingredients, we can provide our and bitBiome’s customers with a new and robust approach to enzyme engineering and development specific to biocatalysis,” said Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “This screening kit builds on our work in DNA synthesis where our customers provide us with sequences and we quickly deliver products. We envision a complementary service wherein customers can not only order specific sequences but also leverage our combined capabilities to identify novel enzymes and protein molecules.”
SOURCE: Businesswire