ESTECO is honoured to sponsor the IRENE Conference, when the final results of the IRENE Project will be presented on the 8th and 9th of May 2012, in Trieste. The meeting aims at presenting the final results of IRENE’s project and to stimulate the dialogue between academic and industrial excellence in the field of computational enzymology. The objective is to explore new horizons for a novel, integrated and effective study of enzyme characteristics.

 Scientific organizing committee:

Lucia Gardossi – Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy
Allan Svendsen - Novozymes A/S, Denmark
Vytas Svedas - Lomonosov Moscow State Univ., Russia
Karl Hult - Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan, Sweden
Jan Jensen - Kobenhavns Universitet, Denmark
Cynthia Ebert – Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy 

IRENE PROJECT
The three-year work of FP7 IRENE project made possible the convergence of different expertise for developing computational methods and strategies for rationally design and produce the next generation of efficient biocatalysts for industrial applications. This will foster the diffusion of sustainable biocatalytic processes in industry and will contribute to build on Europe’s strong position in enzyme manufacturing and utilization to attain leadership in industrial biotechnology.
Due to the strong interaction between theoretical groups and experimentalists all computational tools used in this project will be validated by experiments. Failures and successes will be used for methods’ evaluation, correction, tuning, comparison and combination, in an iterative process that will finally lead to the development of new methods and strategies, but also to the definition of practical guidelines, for any specific enzyme design issue.
According to a recent survey among industry experts in the field of biocatalysis, the major bottlenecks for replacement of conventional synthetic routes with biocatalysts in industry and to the full exploitation of enzymes’ catalytic potential can be identified in the following points:
• requirement of multidisciplinary expertise for the implementation of the whole process, which cannot be afforded by most part of small and medium size enterprises
• longer time for new process development
• the still highly empirical nature of catalyst selection.
IRENE project will aim at overcoming these bottlenecks by the convergence of different expertise which ultimately will lead to a user-friendly computational platform of tools. The framework relies on modeFRONTIER that organizes a flexible and versatile work-flow. These feature makes the approach highly tunable and conversely distant from the concept of “black box” and able to face 4 main tasks:
• fast rational design of efficient biocatalysts to be produced through engineering
• fast and efficient in silico screening of available enzymes/mutants to fully exploit catalytic potential of existing biocatalysts and providing quantitative parameters describing enzyme’s efficiency
• fast substrate-screening and rational substrate engineering
• understanding molecular basis of biocatalyst’ action and properties
IRENE will pursue these objectives by:
• taking advantage of computational strategies used in different disciplines and integrate them in a unified concept for studying enzyme catalysis.
• creating synergies and complementarities between experimental and computational approaches in order to transform information into knowledge.

Please visit the official IRENE website to know more about IRENE Project and to discover the Conference Programme.