Narrative: This award supports a Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) to study a variety of Biochemical Engineering problems. A major thrust will be made to develop genetically engineered proteins with improved physical and catalytic characteristics. Enhanced thermostability of industrially important enzymes will be generated using in vitro techniques, such as site specific mutagenesis and by chemical mutagenesis followed by cloning into thermophilic bacterium and selection of mutants that synthesize temperature tolerant derivatives of the original protein. Also, economical protein recovery schemes will be sought through the construction of gene fusions of the target gene to synthetic oligonucleotides coding for sequences that confer properties which can be exploited for efficient recovery of bioproducts. Studies will also be performed in optimizing the production of recombinant proteins. This effort should result in new applications and greater impact of recombinant DNA in chemical processing.
