Return to Past Awards page. Biocatalysis is widely regarded as a promising new approach to source reduction of pollution associated with chemical manufacturing. It has not been widely adopted to date, however, due to the limited availability of process-compatible biological catalysis. Catalysts are central to modern chemical manufacturing as well as to life. A good catalyst accelerates the rate of a desired reaction compared to unwanted, waste generating, side reactions.
Enzymes are wonderfully selective and specific catalysts.
Enzymes, however, evolved to work in living systems, and enzymes that work well in a chemical process plant have not been broadly available to chemists and chemical engineers. RBI has developed a new technology specifically to meet that unmet need. RBI has developed and applied a powerful, new biodiversity search technology to scan natural sources for new enzymes. Once the best enzyme that nature has to offer for a particular application is identified, RBI applies additional high throughput technology to optimize the enzyme to make it more useful in a chemical plant. This new technology already has produced more than 150 new, robust biological catalysts for the chemical process industry and will generate more than 3,000 by 1997.