Is today the day for phosphoramidite chemistry and/or next-gen sequencing??? #nobel #chemistry

Was great seeing you again :)

Preprint alert! With #PFAS contamination becoming an environmental crisis, we dared to engineer natural defluorinases towards degradation of (un)natural organofluorides. How? Check out our robust growth-based selection platform here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... thanks to @mayerlab.bsky.social !

Overall, our study presents the first large-scale engineering campaign of FAcDs and introduces an operationally simple selection platform that paves the way toward adapting these enzymes for the sustainable degradation of contaminating organofluorides. (5/5)

Forcing populations of bacteria expressing tens of thousands of distinct FAcD-variants to utilize various organofluorides as sole carbon source, we elicited a panel of FAcD variants with improved activities and drastically altered substrate profiles. (4/5)

To expand the substrate scope of FAcDs for non-natural organofluorides, we designed and applied a robust growth-based selection, in which the FAcD-catalyzed C—F bond cleavage of synthetic organofluorides generates metabolizable C-sources. (3/5)

While tailored biocatalysts able to cleave C—F bonds represent an attractive strategy to remediate organofluorides, Nature is largely agnostic to C—F bonds. Fluoroacetate dehalogenases (FAcDs) stands out by promoting the hydrolysis of single C—F bonds in fluoroacetate at high turnover rates. (2/5)

With #PFAS and other organofluorides wreaking havoc, we set out to engineer natural defluorinases for man-made organofluorides. All credit goes to the amazing @suzannejansen.bsky.social, who has outdone herself in this project! (1/5)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In our recent publication, we describe a systematic framework leveraging the documentation of the quantum chemistry suite ORCA for developing large language models that are capable of providing input files based on user prompts with the help of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation […]

Two weeks ago, we had a great group outing, including a city tour through Utrecht, a Mario Kart Wii tournament, and some Rock Band Wii fun! I am truly privileged to work with such a group of talented, dedicated, and smart individuals.

Hello world, hello BlueSky 🙂