This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: New active ingredients for drugs to treat infections, cancer or other serious diseases are often based on substances originally discovered in microorganisms, plants or other living organisms. Producing or improving such active ingredients in a targeted manner using microorganisms is often challenging because the underlying biological processes are extremely complex.
Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) have now shown that artificial intelligence can help with this task. Using AI, they developed novel protein building blocks for biological production systems. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
Nature offers a virtually limitless variety of chemical substances. Although these have been optimized over millions of years of evolution for their respective purposes, they have not been optimized for use as active ingredients in humans. For decades, researchers have therefore been attempting to genetically reprogram microbial producers of active ingredients so that they produce variants of their natural compounds with improved pharmaceutical properties.
A major challenge in this endeavor is that the protein structures responsible for the production of natural products are extremely complex. Many changes to the corresponding blueprints therefore simply result in nonfunctional proteins. A team led by HIPS junior research group leader Dr.
Kenan Bozhüyük has now addressed this problem with a new approach based on artificial intelligence. The idea is that if an AI can understand what makes production systems work, it may even be able to develop new building blocks for such systems that do not occur in nature—thereby further expanding chemical diversity for drug discovery. The study focused on so-called non-ribosomal peptide synthetases, or NRPS for short.
These large enzyme complexes function like molecular assembly lines. They produce a wide variety of biologically active natural compounds in microorganisms, including substances that have served as the basis for the development of numerous antibiotics, immunosuppressants and cancer drugs. The problem is that a product can only be formed if the individual components interact precisely at the right moment.
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