ligase
edyong | April 7, 2008Our bodies are serviced by a huge workforce of enzymes, which speed up the chemical reactions that rage within our cells. These enzymes have been crafted into a vast array of shapes and functions over millions of years of evolution but new ones can be generated on a microchip using the same principles.
Early attempts to design proteins from scratch resulted in fairly crude enzymes that were outperformed by nature's more elegant and finely-tuned efforts. Scientists have since developed more efficient artificial enzymes using the same evolutionary principles that generated naturally occurring…