The 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday morning to three scientists who put evolution to work to design molecules from living organisms that eventually led to the development of cleaner biofuels and drugs for treating diseases including psoriasis.
Half of the $1 million prize went to Frances Arnold, 62, at the California Institute of Technology, the fifth woman ever to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The remainder was divided between George Smith, 77, at the University of Missouri Columbia and Gregory Winter, 67, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom.
Humans have been tinkering with other species since at least the dawn of civilization, from domesticating dogs to breeding more productive crops. But what the 2018 Nobel chemistry laureates figured out was how to use those same principles of selectively reproducing desired traits to make specific molecules, namely enzymes and antibodies.
Arnold tackled enzymes. These are proteins that serve as catalysts, speeding up chemical reactions without being used up in the process. In nature, enzymes do things like break apart long starch chains into sugars, assemble proteins, or transcribe DNA.
But suppose you want an enzyme to do something slightly different, say turn a starchy plant like corn into a clean-burning biofuel. The requires tuning biological machinery from a bacterium or fungus with a technique known as directed evolution to break down the corn in a new way.
