A matchmaking app for biocatalysis

Enzymes are great at building complex molecules, and in some cases greener and safer than traditional chemical reagents. But they can also be notoriously picky about the molecules they work on, which can make it hard for chemists to incorporate them into organic synthesis. Finding the right biocatalyst for a given molecule often means screening a big library of enzymes, which can be “a nonstarter” for many organic chemists, said University of Michigan–Ann Arbor biocatalysis researcher Alison Narayan . That’s why she and her group teamed up with machine-learning-for-chemistry expert Gabe Gomes and his group at Carnegie Mellon to develop Catnip , a web app that predicts which biocatalysts are likely to work for a given molecule and vice versa. The researchers published the work in a preprint ( ChemRxiv 2024 DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-w4dtr). Narayan presented the project on March 26 at the American Chemical Society Spring 2025 meeting. Carnegie Mellon