Jiří Damborský and Zbyněk Prokop have won a Masaryk University (MUNI) Innovation Award for their pioneering commercialisation efforts .
Enantis is the first biotechnology spin-off of Masaryk University. Inspired by the colleagues at Groningen University in The Netherlands, Enantis was started by Zbynek Prokop and Jiri Damborsky when Masaryk University did not have a tech-transfer office. With the great help of the young South Moravian Innovation centre, establishing a technology company helped cultivate an academic environment and set up necessary processes for effective transfer of results from academic research to practice. Other companies followed. Enantis is currently known for the production of hyperstable growth factors essential for the cultivation of stem cells (FGF2), which were engineered using the platform developed by the Loschmidt Laboratories. Both Loschmidt Laboratories and Enantis are Es-Cat partners and benefited from the creative and collaborative ecosystem of this European network.
This is Elvira, writing about the MolSim winter school for Es-Cat.
That’s how my 2020 started: Understanding molecular simulation.
Every year, the computational chemistry group of the University of Amsterdam and the CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) give the opportunity to PhD students to participate in a two-weeks winter school.
During the MolSim2020 winter school, physicists, mathematicians and chemists have the opportunity to listen to interesting talks and learn about advanced Monte Carlo, and Molecular Dynamics. While Molecular Dynamics solve the equations of motion, in the Monte Carlo simulations, sampling is important.
In particular, for Monte Carlo simulations and advanced Monte Carlo, a very simple but important bring-home message was stressed out during the course:
Always respect detailed balance.
If you can’t do detailed balance, at least balance.
Moreover, during the course we had the pleasure of having prof. Daan Frenkel and prof. Berend Smith as teachers. They are the authors of the book “Understanding Molecular Simulation: From Algorithms to Applications”, on which the course is based.
Explain all the concepts can require months of lessons, therefore for people interested, here you can find all the course material: http://www.acmm.nl/molsim/molsim2020/
In particular, this year we had also the opportunity to be introduced to Machine Learning techniques and how to use them in computational approaches. Moreover, the last day, there was a very nice talk on DFT (Density functional theory) methods by prof. Nicola Marzari (N. Marzari, Materials modelling: The frontiers and the challenges, Nature Materials 15, 381; 2016). He got the attention of the audience with a comparison between DFT methods and . It seems DFT and tinder have three points in common:
Both are very popular! Everyone does it!
It’s fast and easy (and requires no thinking)
You can swipe functionals left, until you find the one that works for you (for a while)
The course was a very nice opportunity to learn new concepts while playing fussball, pool and sharing opinions with other PhDs over a few beers in Amsterdam.
PhD students using physic theorems to win pool.
PhD students drinking beers somewhere in Amsterdam.
Today’s post was prepared by ES-Cat ESR Paul Zurek
Hello everyone!
I am back from the Netherlands! All the ES-Cat ESRs met and took part in a seminar on computational approaches for enzyme design last summer. I found the topic to be really interesting; it is important to make biocatalysis and protein engineering more efficient and cheaper, so that people can easily use it. Strong computational tools would be ideal for that reason. From my point of view, there are a lot of approaches right now that work decently and could help enable more biocatalysis!
In the seminar, we focused on a few approaches and methods than can be used and had more detailed practicals in molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations. We learned how they were applied in the CASCO workflow for designing enantioselectivity from Dick Janssen [1] and heard about the efforts to make computational protein engineering tools more accessible and easy-to-use by Jiri Damborsky [2].
In my PhD work I plan to apply these methods, as I am interested in studying the evolvability of proteins. I would like to figure out what characteristics make a good starting point for protein engineering. It will be necessary to verify findings and test to see flexibility and the sampling of so-called sub-states over the course of evolution. I am really liking Silvia Osuna’s recent work on the importance of allosteric regulation of conformational sub-states over the course of directed evolution [3]. We have seen mutations distal from the active site playing crucial role in enzyme activity, so it does make a lot of sense to look more into the dynamics of evolutionary intermediates. Now that I have the tools necessary to look into protein dynamics from the workshop, I’ll be able to investigate potential changes in flexibility in my evolutionary trajectory!
After the insightful ES-Cat seminar, I stayed in Groningen for an additional week to participate in the BioTrans 2019 conference. It was nice to see a lot of the discussed tools being applied to difficult to assay reactions during the talks and poster session of the conference. Also, I finally saw a talk by Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 for her seminal work on directed evolution. It was a great talk, rather conceptual and inspiring.
Prof. Frances Arnold giving a talk at the BioTrans 2019 conference in Groningen, explaining the concept of sequence space in directed evolution.
We did also have the time to explore Groningen on our own. We rented bikes and went for a ride around lovely Groningen on the weekend. Waterways and lush greens everywhere. I really do like that water focused life style the Dutch have mastered for themselves. We even had time to ride up to almost the North Sea!
Fellow ESR Wolfgang Koch and me almost at the North Sea, near Groningen NL.Coloured houses in Groningen, NL.
A few weeks ago, I went to the Hollfelder lab for a week as part of my ES-Cat secondment. I plan to visit for a longer time (around a month) later in the Summer.
For my project, I use microfluidic droplets to screen large amounts of library variants. In our lab we can do most of the upstream and downstream work, but for microfluidics know-how and equipment I rely on our collaborators in the Cambridge group in the network.
The plan was to go for a short visit and to
do some sorting on one of the libraries that I made to test if the whole
process works, and if not, what I need to fix and/or improve before coming back
for a longer visit in which I will sort through all my libraries.
In addition, we wanted to test a different method to express our cells for droplet sorting. Up until now we had encapsulated a single cell in each droplet. This works but has some issues. One of them is that cells seem to clump together after expression starts. This makes encapsulation tricky, as the cells have the tendency to stick together and form a biofilm, rather than moving neatly across the microfluidic channels as they ought to. Another problem is that after sorting the cells, the recovery is below 100% (not every cell that is sorted grows back.)
Growth and expression in droplets could potentially fix both of these issues. If no enzyme is expressed during the droplet formation, the sticking together is not an issue, and once expression starts the cells are free to stick together in the droplet however much they want. The recovery could also be helped, if each droplet contains (50-100) cells, 10-20% recovery still means getting back multiple copies of each variant. The reason to use microdroplets in the first place is to link the phenotype to the genotype (there is only one E. coli cell expressing a variant per droplet). Having many cells in each droplet may then sound counter-intuitive, but since a single cell is encapsulated, every cell that will grow inside the droplet is identical to the other cells in the droplet, thus phenotype and genotype are still linked. The advantage is that now we can oversample at a step where it is not that much extra time, instead of oversampling by sorting 5-10 times longer or with 5-10 times less coverage, now we can oversample by simply plating out more of the sorted cells (which is only a little bit of extra work in the evening).
Droplet sorting setup ready for action (as soon as the light goes out)
The visit as part of the secondment would started on a Tuesday. I arrived in Cambridge Monday afternoon, got to my airB&B and prepared a bit for starting the next day. Since we only had 6 days to make all droplets, do incubations and sort, the schedule was quite packed. I arrived on Tuesday morning to the lab and started preparing buffers, substrates, and whatever else was needed. I also got the samples that I had sent on dry-ice shipment a week ahead of me.
Immediately I (re)discovered the biggest problem of working someplace new. Where do these guys keep their Eppendorf tubes? Where is the medium? In which cupboard is this component of my buffer? Where are my tips? What is shared and what do I need to prepare myself? While I like to believe that as I get further along in my education and career I’m getting better at coming up with solutions to scientific or practical challenges, the answer to ‘where is this particular piece of material stored in this lab?’ remains as insurmountable as when I stepped into a lab for the first time.
The other thing that does not change when coming to a new lab (though this one pleasant, if at times a bit overwhelming) is meetings lots of new people and hearing about the stuff they are working on. I knew the people from the network, and some from previous visits during the network meetings and my previous sorting visit, but there were some new faces, as well as lots of faces I had to remember.
Droplets under the microscope
Since there was a limited amount of time, we set up both the envisioned new method and a repeat of the previous method as a comparison. This would also let us fall back to a method proven to be mediocre if the method thought to be great turned out to be dismal. We could look at some of the droplets under the microscope and confirm that something was actually growing. Over half were empty (they should be, as a side effect of preventing a lot of your droplets containing multiple cells), but the rest were all ‘teeming’ with cells. Some clumping (aforementioned problem) was observed, but since the cells are already in droplet this should not affect the encapsulation anymore.
A droplet being sorted
We did the screening at multiple timepoints, and using two different protocols for droplet growth and recovered the sorted cells, which I plated on LB-agar. The sorting seemed to work, and in all cases at least around 10 cells per droplet (based on calculations and estimations) were recovered. Due to the packed time-schedule I did not have time to do follow-up experiments to verify the recovery while in Cambridge, but luckily all the sorting work results in just a few Eppendorf tubes worth of material per sorted library, so these would be sent after me back to Munster, where I could do the follow-up experiments to verify that we actually sorted what we thought.
On Sunday, I managed to wrap everything up and get ready for the first train Monday morning to make it to the plane back to Germany. That Tuesday, I was scheduled for a regular research update for my group (either ideally or horribly timed, depending on which way you look at it). Since then, I did follow-up checks on the cells were recovered and found out that one of the protocols for the new method worked quite well, although there are still some issues that could be fixed to improve efficiency.
All in all, it was a short and busy but both productive and enjoyable stay.
The Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) General Assembly & Annual Conference was held in Vienna, 24 – 25 February, 2019: an amazing conference over two productive days, and a great opportunity for networking.
ES-Cat ESRs Aşkın and Jason attended the MCAA Annual Conference, 2019
Different panel sessions were held in the conference with various topics, such as Entrepreneurship: How to Start a Start-up, Mentoring and Outreach Projects, Mental Health of Researchers, Workplace Harassment, Writing Proposals, Future of Research Artificial Intelligence, Refugees and Higher Education. All had an amazing and excellent discussion.
Interesting talks inspired attendees. Many take-home messages, tips and tricks for career paths were given by the inspiring speakers.
Furthermore, there were paper and digital poster sessions from different areas of science – from life sciences to social sciences – that gave attendees a chance to present our research.
From my point of view, it was a great experience to attend this event. I met lots of people that have different stories in academia and outside the academia. One of the most inspiring talk was given by Themis Christophidou who is the Director-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission. Her message was ‘Wisdom is loving the world enough to assume responsibility’. Moreover, different sessions with valuable speakers provided me different perspectives. In general, we do not need to be afraid of the future of research, just need to take responsibility, communicate, be motivated and most importantly stay happy and healthy.
Goal The course aims to make participants familiar with the use of structural biology and computational tools for engineering the performance of enzymes that are relevant for applied biocatalysis and synthetic biology. The course provides both a theoretical background on computational methods relevant to enzyme engineering (protein crystallography, homology modeling, energy calculations, protein design, smart libraries), and hands-on computer exercises on visualization and analysis of enzymes structures, including docking simulations and enzyme redesign. The theoretical and practical parts are integrated in a few problem-solving modules. Participants will have the opportunity to share their research via short oral presentations, posters, and interactive lectures.
Topics Protein crystallography and structure analysis Homology modeling, docking and molecular dynamics simulations (Yasara) Computational enzyme (re)design (Rosetta) Enzyme engineering supported by web tools Sequence- and structure-based smart libraries Thermostability and stereoselectivity engineering Industrial examples of enzyme engineering
Tutors and teachers Dick Janssen, University of Groningen Hein Wijma, University of Groningen Andy-Mark Thunnissen, University of Groningen Jiri Damborsky, Masaryk University, Brno David Bednar, Masaryk University, Brno Marc van der Kamp, University of Bristol Rene de Jong, DSM Delft Emanuele Monza, Zymvol, Barcelona
Masterclass coordination Dick Janssen, Hein Wijma, University of Groningen, The Netherlands Jiri Damborsky and David Bednar, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Sandra Haan & Tamara Hummel, GBB, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Intended participants PhD students, post docs and other researchers skilled in biochemistry who want to become familiar with structure-based and computational approaches in Enzyme Engineering. Partners of the H2020 ES-Cat and other EU collaborative projects and training networks are offered priority reduced fee registration. Note: participants are offered the opportunity to share their research via posters and participant talks.
To Apply Details will follow. For info: mccomputational@rug.nl.
Today’s post was prepared by ES-Cat ESR Nikolas Capra
Video games made their breakthrough in the 80s, but have been part of our daily life and pop culture for almost 10 years. Like comic book characters and superheroes, they have become popular, and have an estimated 2.5 billion players worldwide1 (Fig. 1). Of course, video games cover a wide range of genres and topics, and luckily science found a place among all the shooters and well narrated, breath-taking, plots.
Figure 1: Number of video game players around the world in 2016
Before 1998, scientists in video games were almost always evil and villainous (like Dr. Eggman from the Sonic series) but this situation was saved by Dr. Gordon Freeman, a fictional theoretical physicist featured in the Half-Life series. Unfortunately, he had to fight aliens with a crowbar, not with science.
Again, in 1998, a masterpiece appeared on the console market by the name of Metal Gear Solid. Although the game is tactical-action and has absolutely no glimpses of scientists, the plot starts to introduce the topic of genetic engineering and nanotechnology (Fig. 2). The main character Solid Snake, who has been injected with nanorobots, must infiltrate a facility and fight villains that have been enhanced genetically, making his way among the genomic soldiers. This time there are no rogue scientists but a misuse of science. It might be that I overthink things, but the message that struck me, other than feeding my interest in science, is how science can be used for the wrong purposes, even if the technologies were made with the purpose of improving life quality. Besides the message, it has been a powerful vehicle for science by inspiring young players to know more about it, including me.
Figure 2: Sorry Snake.
This
mixture of science, action and sci-fi opened the doors to science in the video game
world.
Since the release of Metal Gear Solid, the topic of science in games has reached a crescendo. Many video games over the next years used science to enrich their plots. Some accurately, some…originally.
Covering a wide range of topics, from biology to engineering and physics, games are becoming more accurate and some of them are totally focused on the science, like in Kerbal Space Program where you need to build a space rocket, take off and land, adjusting the flight according to gravity and your orbit. To be honest, it was too difficult for me to play so I couldn’t try all the features and explore the physics behind the game.
But since we are way fonder of biology than physics and there are a huge number of games that involve science, it’s easier to make a list of the most (in)famous biology moments in video games. Therefore, here is my personal list of the “Best Biology in Games”.
+ Resident Evil (1998): This famous game (and spin-off movie), paints a portrait of a world where a modified virus capable of bringing dead cells back to life, makes its way to the outer world. Despite the fictional idea of bringing back dead cells, the so-called T-virus, being modified from Ebola, can be spread only though saliva or blood and modifies the host on a cellular level. In the years after, the infectious virus is replaced by a parasite that modifies the host’s behaviour. Considering that parasites that changes host behaviour exist in nature (like the Cordyceps, also known as “zombie fungus”), I would consider the biology quite accurate.
+ + Spider-Man (2018): There is no need for introduction. Spider-Man has been part of many people’s childhoods. I’m not here to discuss whether being bitten by a radioactive spider gives you superpowers or a horrible and painful death. We all like to dream that if it ever happened, we would wake up with the amazing features of the animal that bit us. Except if it is a skunk. That’s the worst superpower. EVER. Terrible for social interactions too. Anyway, in this video game, Norman Osborne finds a cure that can correct genetic abnormalities. I was like “Hey, that’s cool but tell us how!” and apparently this cure uses CRISPR genome editing combined with an AI controlled gRNA to identify and edit mutations in the DNA. I would say that is quite an impressive mention in a video game. But the even cooler thing is that machine learning coupled with genome editing is not sci-fi but actual science and you can find it in here. This is shockingly accurate for being a video game on a non-biology topic.
+ + + Plague Inc. (2012): This is absolutely the most accurate non-educational game featuring biology. The game is very simple: select a host, infect people, change your features, annihilate the whole world (Fig. 3). The starting choices are “the usual suspects”: bacteria, virus or parasite. Each one of them has different traits such as fast replication rate and sturdiness for the bacteria, high mutation rate for the virus, and low detection for the parasite. Through the game you have to manage virulence, infectiousness and lethality. The goal is to infect and kill every human on Earth but as the plague spreads, the humans will respond by closing airports, harbours and they’ll start cooperating to find a cure to the disease and stop it from destroying humanity as we know it. The game was so realistic that has even attracted the attention of the CDC!
Figure 3: Host selection screen in the game Plague Inc.
Of course, there are more games concerning science and game designed by scientists to allow people to help with research, like the protein-folding game Foldit. There are also a variety of educational games that unfortunately are not well-know or promoted.
I will leave you then with a question: can we scientists use video games
as a tool to inspire young players to become scientists? Can we use games to
explain complex concepts in an easy and appealing way to share science with
non-scientists?
Science and knowledge belong to the world and as a scientist, I think that our duty includes gifting our knowledge to everyone with every means we can use.
On the 7th and 8th July 2018, ahead of the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2018 in Toulouse, France, I attended a two-day Satellite Event hosted by European Commission and entirely dedicated to the MSCA (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions) community. The Satellite Event included sessions on transferable skills such as “How to Engage with Public and Policy-Makers” and “How and where to best present your project”.
At the end of this event I prepared this 5-minute talk to communicate my research project in easier words!
If you’re in the UK, you have to have a pub dinner.
It’s the law.
The ES-Cat Midterm Review (Interim) Meeting was held at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, on the 14th and 15th of January, 2019.
This meeting was an opportunity for the ESRs to meet up, present their research progress to each other, and meet with EU representatives. As we are at the midway point of the ES-Cat Consortium, a major focus of this meeting was career opportunities for ESRs. They were encouraged to be proactive in planning for life after their PhDs, and to make use of LinkedIn to highlight their broad skill sets and seek out opportunities.
During the MTR, ESRs also attended a facility tour of Johnson Matthey. Solid state chemistry falls a bit outside of many of the ESRs’ specialties, so it was a great opportunity to see a very different type of lab (including some stellar small molecule crystallography equipment) and learn more about the pharmacy industry.
Paul modeling fashionable biosecurity footwear
Small molecule X-Ray diffraction set up
ESRs learning about drug solubility. No use taking a drug if it won’t get to the part of the body that needs it!
We will be posting more frequently here, so if you’re interested in the work being done as part of the ES-Cat network, add us to your RSS feed, or check back often!
. It seems DFT and tinder have three points in common:
ES-Cat 