Introduction

Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied ChemistryOur goal is to discover, design and produce biocatalysts that tailor the chemical and physical functionality of major renewable bioresources (e.g., cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, chitin) for their broader use in value-added materials.

Our focus on biocatalysts that upgrade, rather than degrade, major bioresources provide biomanufacturing technologies that generate bio-based materials with high atom efficiency and potential to reduce reliance on petrochemicals.

Our approach benefits from three key advantages of biocatalyts: 1) catalytic specificity that allows predictable modification of complex substrates, 2) water-based catalyses at moderate conditions that retain beneficial properties of the starting material, and 3) unmatched ability to design new catalysts through protein modelling and engineering, expanding their applications.

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