EQS-News

Collaboration between BRAIN Biotech and AMSilk: Protein engineering successfully improves structural proteins for performance materials - Seite 2

The structural proteins underlying AMSilk’s protein fibers can be modified at the amino acid level using BRAIN Biotech's technologies so that the products can be tailored to specific market requirements.

The success of this strategic R&D collaboration is based on the use of BRAIN Biotech’s rational design in protein engineering. Using this technology, BRAIN Biotech has built a successful track record over many years in the enzyme technology unit at Zwingenberg. BRAIN Biotech had already successfully used its protein engineering strategy in the development of a variety of protein and enzyme products in order to tailor them for industrial applications. In addition to AMSilk’s scientific expertise in the field of spider silk-based proteins, AMSilk also contributes an understanding of customer and market requirements. The results of the collaboration that have now been achieved show once again that the applied scientific strategy can lead to completely new products.

Dr. Alexander Pelzer, Head of Research & Development at BRAIN Biotech at the Zwingenberg site, emphasizes: “Our successful rational protein engineering is based on the combination of two factors: the experience of our team – in conjunction with sequencing and structure-based bioinformatics methods, including AI predictions. The strategic R&D partnership with AMSilk is an excellent example of the power of our protein engineering pipeline.”

Pelzer cites powerful bioinformatics including the various AI approaches used by the experienced protein engineering experts at BRAIN Biotech as the basis for protein engineering, tailoring their approach to each specific inquiry. Drawing on the profound experience of their team, suggested optimizations are then implemented using molecular biology and tested in the laboratory. After successfully producing and characterizing these structural proteins on a milliliter scale, BRAIN Biotech scales up the top candidates in a fermenter on a liter scale, making them available to AMSilk for application testing.