In June 2022 our lab started at the University of Groningen. We are an interdisciplinary group that uses high-throughput protein engineering as a strategy for the development and improvement of computational protein design. Our research aims to address current limitations of computational design by tapping the power of cutting-edge high-throughput screening technologies for directed evolution. This approach will not only allow the rapid generation of bespoke functional proteins, but also the massive data accumulation on design variant activities, which will allow the improvement of computational pipelines and algorithms, and will enable efficient machine learning approaches for future designs.

The screening systems we initially intend to employ are particularly suitable for tailoring stability and binding affinities, but we aim to also tackle the challenging task of enzyme design. Resulting from a strong believe in the transformative potential of synthetic biology, we are particularly interested in enzymatic functions enabling the manipulation of genetics and bio-orthogonal chemistry. Accordingly, our research generates workflows in which computationally designed enzyme variants are screened for the biocatalytic production of modified cofactors, nucleotides, and DNA/RNA, intended to create commercially valuable molecules, and for synthetic biology and biomedical applications.