Bleeding Edge

Complex molecule synthesis via biocatalysis…

Biocatalysis refers to the use of living systems or their parts to speed up chemical reactions.

In biocatalytic processes, natural catalysts, such as enzymes, bacteria, viruses, et al, perform chemical transformations on organic compounds that are far reaching and transformative in their essential proceeds towards complete transformation.

Think alchemy, but consider it to be simple bio-organic chemistry and microbiology, for use in altering our natural environments to different and variables states.

Biocatalysis is also the process of natural sources, such as plants, fungi and microbes, that have historically provided compounds with potent pharmaceutical properties, to now being drafted to clean up our earth’s most polluted sites.

As the lead scientist of the Environmental Parliament and the Environmental University of Oxford – I first chanced upon this natural discovery by observe how nature takes over and finds ways to clean up nuclear devastated sites, like Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as the sites of Windscales and even Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

In more recent years – I delved into the details of finding how the use of various bacteria that I had identified helped clean the soil from even the crystal salts that store the most of the radiation in the ground and thus give a twofer, reclaiming soil from rich irradiation levels to a lower level, far less acidic, and far less salty. Microbes helped me clean up Fukushima soils to the point of making it suitable for agriculture…

Imagine…

If we can enlarge the scope of that utilization of bacteria and microbial organisms to clean up and de-acidify and de-salt our most fragile ecosystems — methinks that we can open up vast new areas of land that has been damaged, to a new state of equilibrium that is fruitful for food production and agriculture.

And while it can be challenging to build complex natural products in a lab using existing chemistry methods, Nature has perfected these biosynthetic pathways, and the microbial organisms that thrive in some extreme environments can be transported and cause transformational change in the more ordinary ecosystems such as those of the Bay of Bengal regions of Bangladesh delta — a region that abuts the rising seawaters and as those low-lying areas, have suffered the frequent salt water inundation, as salt-water annually floods these lands, making them unsuitable for agricultural dude to the high salinity and acidity that is left behind.

Depriving large tracts of low long areas of agriculture form Peoples, and Nations that are already prone to regular famines, droughts and environmental catastrophes, makes for a nightmare of forced migrations of many millions of people who see the rising sea levels, devastating the soil that their agriculture is reliant upon, and thus causing a societal collapse due to their diminished ability to feed themselves.

Because when the soil agriculture gets diminished beyond hope — people up stakes and move.

Remember the 1920s dust bowl effect on America’s agriculture, and multiply y a thousand…

Climate refugees are a particularly unwanted lot of people, because they are considered economic refugees and as such are not protected by the provisions of lawful protections of the UN and the US laws and regulations, and as such are simply seen as patterns of Human Migration.

My related political work aims to change that, by giving equal protection rights to all climate refugees as those ascribed to political and faith prosecuted refugees who need and receive adequate protections from the body of Law.

However, and in addition to my work on the political and legalistic Human Rights agenda — my scientific environmental work, leverages the power of Nature’s microbial tools for building complex molecules to synthesize novel molecules with therapeutic potential, for both people and the land we inhabit, and for all other energetic processes we engage into, because the reactivity and selectivity of enzymes from natural product pathways are often unparalleled in existing chemical methods.

Both organic and inorganic chemistry can be changed dramatically and be transformed seemingly overnight into a highly desirable outcome…

Imagine…

Imagine a molecule that I have been working on that can trap energy from the sun and retain it for long periods of time, up until when we want to extract it for our use…
A new type of cheap battery?

Perhaps.

Or even better a better way for photosynthesis…

All Human energy needs will be met rather inexpensively….

Paradise Redux?

Not…

But certainly the Alchemists’s stone is to be found herewith.

Yours,
Dr Churchill

PS:

Enzymes with potential synthetic utility are used as a starting point for engineering biocatalysts with (1) broad substrate scope, (2) high catalytic efficiency, and (3) exquisite site- and stereoselectivity.

These biocatalytic methods are employed to efficiently synthesize biologically active complex molecules.

And this is something we shall be doing at KAUST in Saudi Arabia soonest…

God willing, we shall achieve Victory over Human Want and Human Need…