Caltech Scientist Is among 3 Awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Sparking ‘a Revolution in Evolution’

by Deborah Newtburn and Karen Kaplan (Los Angeles Times) ... Frances Arnold, a biochemical engineer at Caltech, was awarded half of the $1.01-million prize for her pioneering experiments in the field known as directed evolution.

“Our laureates have applied the principles of Darwin in the test tube and used this approach to develop new types of chemicals for the great benefit of humankind,” he said.

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Arnold is the fifth woman to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry and the first since 2009, when Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel was honored for her work in mapping the structure of ribosomes.

Marie Curie became the first woman to win the chemistry prize in 1911, for her discovery of the radioactive elements radium and polonium. She had already won the Nobel Prize in physics eight years earlier.

Arnold is the first woman at Caltech to receive a Nobel Prize. But she does not expect to be the last.

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Initially trained as a mechanical and aerospace engineer, Arnold would discover that she could improve the world through chemistry. She hoped to replace traditional chemical reactions that used heavy metals, solvents and destructive acids with new reactions inspired by the inner workings of living beings.

The key to her plan was enzymes, the proteins that direct biochemical reactions inside organisms. To get a desired reaction, she needed to customize an enzyme. But she came to realize that engineering an enzyme was way too big a job for humans, even with their state-of-the-art computers.

But the job wasn’t too big for nature.

“I think of what I do as copying nature’s design process,” she said.

In directed evolution experiments, scientists start with an enzyme that has some of the properties they are looking for. Next, they introduce a few mutations into its genetic code — perhaps by inserting a sequence from another enzyme with different desirable properties. Then they allow the enzyme to replicate, usually inside bacteria.

At this point, nature takes its course, and new, random mutations develop through the same process that drives evolution.

Scientists then screen all the resulting enzymes, selecting the ones that do the best job of carrying out the hoped-for reaction. The other enzymes are discarded, and the process is repeated over and over until the desired result is reached.

By relying on random genetic mutations to create many different versions of a single enzyme, a scientist doesn’t have to know ahead of time which specific mutation will create the desired result.

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Her work has been used to create biofuels, make more effective pharmaceuticals and even create more environmentally friendly detergents. READ MORE

Inspired by evolution: Caltech bioengineer is first woman to win $1.1-million tech prize (Los Angeles Times)

Nobel Prize For Chemistry Goes To Three Scientists For Harnessing Sped-Up Evolution For Best-Selling Drug, Biofuels (KHN)

Chemistry Nobel for using evolution to create new proteins (Washington Post/Associated Press)

Frances Arnold wins Nobel Prize for Chemistry: Gevo, Provivi co-founder honored for directed evolution technology (Biofuels Digest)

Excerpt from Biofuels Digest: Dr. Arnold is the co-founder Gevo and Provivi — technologies which spun out of her lab, and she continues to serve on the Provivi board of directors. Directed evolution technology, which was developed in her lab, was licensed originally to Maxygen and was ultimately spun out into Codexis, which continues to use the technology as its core. She also at various times served on the scientific advisory boards of Genomatica, Amyris, Mascoma, Fluidigm, and Codexis.

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The Nobel Committee wrote
The power of evolution is revealed through the diversity of life. The 2018 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have taken control of evolution and used it for purposes that bring the greatest benefit to humankind. Enzymes produced through directed evolution are used to manufacture everything from biofuels to pharmaceuticals.

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One half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Frances H. Arnold. In 1993, she conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, which are proteins that catalyse chemical reactions. Since then, she has refined the methods that are now routinely used to develop new catalysts. The uses of Frances Arnold’s enzymes include more environmentally friendly manufacturing of chemical substances, such as pharmaceuticals, and the production of renewable fuels for a greener transport sector.

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Gevo CEO Patrick R. Gruber said “This award is well deserved. Frances has been a leader in the development of enzymes. Gevo has been the beneficiary of her good work. She, with her research group, developed some of the critical enzymes needed for Gevo’s biological pathway to produce renewable resource-based isobutanol. Her work helped to establish Gevo as a leader in renewable resource based chemicals and fuels. We congratulate her on her Nobel Prize, and for co-founding Gevo.”

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Dr. Arnold had won almost everything you could win up to the time of this well-deserved Nobel.

To name just a few, she was inducted into the US National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Her awards include the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Technology Prize, the National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Prize in Convergence Research, and the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She also chairs the Advisory Panel of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowships in Science and Engineering. READ MORE

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 (Kungl. vetenskaps akademien)