University of California

Scriptgen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

James U Bowie

Tyler P Korman

Paul H Opgenorth

Andrew A Pakula

Meaghan Valliere

Nicholas Woodall

David S Eisenberg

Roland Luthy

Provided is an enzyme useful for prenylation and recombinant pathways for the production of cannabinoids, cannabinoid precursors and other prenylated chemicals in a cell free system as well and recombinant microorganisms that catalyze the reactions.

Biosynthetic platform for the production of cannabinoids and other prenylated compounds

Provided is an engineered pathway that can function in a cell-free system, cellular system or a combination thereof to convert a sugar to a chemical or biofuel.

Cell-free metabolic pathway for glucose metabolism with a molecular purge valve

The disclosure provides a metabolic pathway for producing a metabolite, the metabolic pathway having a co-factor purge valve system for recycling a cofactor used in the metabolic pathway.

Synthetic biochemistry molecular purge valve module that maintain co-factor balance

The disclosure provides a metabolic pathway for producing a metabolite, the metabolic pathway having a co-factor regulatory system for cofactor utilization in the metabolic pathway.

Molecular rheostat for cofactor balance

A novel method for screening chemical compounds, test ligands, for potential pharmaceutical effectiveness. The disclosed method identifies possible therapeutic test ligands by placing them in the presence of target proteins and determining the ability of test ligands to increase the ratio of folded target protein to unfolded target protein. This differs significantly from known methods of novel pharmaceutical testing in that the biochemical function of the target protein need not be known and, except for one of the five embodiments of the method, the existence of any known ligands of the target protein is unnecessary.

Screening method for identifying ligands for target proteins

A computer-assisted method for identifying protein sequences that fold into a known three-dimensional structure. The inventive method attacks the inverse protein folding problem by finding target sequences that are most compatible with profiles representing the structural environments of the residues in known three-dimensional protein structures. The method starts with a known three-dimensional protein structure and determines three key features of each residue's environment within the structure: (1) the total area of the residue's side-chain that is buried by other protein atoms, inaccessible to solvent; (2) the fraction of the side-chain area that is covered by polar atoms (O, N) or water, and (3) the local secondary structure. Based on these parameters, each residue position is categorized into an environment class. In this manner, a three-dimensional protein structure is converted into a one-dimensional environment string, which represents the environment class of each residue in the folded protein structure. A 3D structure profile table is then created containing score values that represent the frequency of finding any of the 20 common amino acids structures at each position of the environment string. These frequencies are determined from a database of known protein structures and aligned sequences. The method determines the most favorable alignment of a target protein sequence to the residue positions defined by the environment string, and determines a 'best fit' alignment score, S.sub.ij, for the target sequence. Each target sequence may then be further characterized by a ZScore, which is the number of standard deviations that S.sub.ij for the target sequence is above the mean alignment score for other target sequences of similar length.

Growing community of inventors

Culver City, CA, United States of America

James U Bowie