First bacterial enzyme of its kind offers a gentler, greener way to build drugs and food ingredients

Chemists often need to oxidise sugars and alcohols — add oxygen at exactly one spot — and the usual tools are harsh chemicals or an enzyme borrowed from fungi. A team led by Ligia Martins at ITQB NOVA, part of NOVA University Lisbon, reports the first galactose oxidase ever found in a bacterium, named PsGalOx, with an unusual twin sugar-gripping structure that computer modelling helped reveal. Through directed evolution — breeding the enzyme in the lab for better performance — they produced a variant 40 to 1,800 times more efficient across a range of sugars and alcohols, working with plain oxygen under mild conditions instead of aggressive oxidants. Published in Chem & Bio Engineering, it is the kind of quiet tool that makes manufacturing cleaner behind the scenes.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation