“Our ultimate goal is to be able to put as much chemistry as we can into microbes. We can use microbes to do a lot of complicated chemistry, and the way in which this will be done is through the use of enzymes. One can imagine where you could take a series of promiscuous enzymes that would make different parts of a molecular compound, and combine them to obtain a final product that could do whatever you needed it to do.”
“This process is highly dependent on the fact that the functions of promiscuous proteins can be altered with just a small number of amino acid substitutions, a property known as plasticity. It was our contention that the application of the theory of divergent molecular evolution to promiscuous enzymes would enable us to design enzymes with greater specificity and higher activity.”
“The reason that the drug is very expensive is because it's produced in minute quantities in the plant, so it takes lot of plant material to get enough drug to treat one patient.”
