Designing a catalyst from scratch
Could we design an enzyme atom by atom, on a computer, for any reaction we want?
What makes this fascinating
Enzymes are master chemists — Natural catalysts speed reactions up by factors of billions, with exquisite precision.
Design vs. evolution — We mostly tweak existing catalysts; building one atom by atom for any target reaction is the dream.
Computational enzyme design — New AI-driven methods are starting to invent enzymes from scratch — but reliability is far from solved.
Frequently asked questions
- Can we design a catalyst from scratch?
- Not reliably yet. Designing an enzyme or catalyst atom by atom for an arbitrary reaction — rather than discovering one by screening or tweaking natural ones — remains largely beyond our predictive power.
- Why is rational catalyst design so hard?
- Catalysis depends on subtle, dynamic arrangements of atoms and energy landscapes that are extremely hard to predict, so most catalysts are still found by experiment and intuition rather than designed from theory.
- What would it enable?
- On-demand catalysts could make chemical manufacturing far cleaner and cheaper and unlock reactions we can't currently perform efficiently — from greener fuels to new medicines.
More summits in Chemistry
Artificial photosynthesis
Plants turn sunlight, water and air into fuel. Can we engineer it to power the world cleanly?
Room-temperature catalysis of nitrogen fixation
Feeding humanity depends on a brutally energy-hungry reaction. Nature does it gently — can we?
Predicting a molecule's properties from first principles
Can we compute what a new material or drug will do before ever making it?
The origin of homochirality
Life uses only left-handed amino acids. Why did nature pick a hand — and why that one?
Ready to climb?
Learn it the whole way up — from the fundamentals to the frontier.