Enzyme prospecting for better diagnostics

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the limitations in diagnostic testing approaches. Cheap, robust, and field-deployable tests that did not require instrumentation would change the nature of how we could respond and contain disease spread. A major limitation in the generation of point-of-need (PON) assays is enzyme performance. Many enzymes have been optimized to work well with high end machines, but similar effort has not been put into enzyme engineering for enzyme that will make field-deployable assay work well. Specifically, we need enzymes that perform rapidly and robustly, in vitro, at ambient temperature as opposed to elevated temperatures. Here we will use a combination of enzyme prospecting and enzyme engineering together with high throughput screening approaches to identify enzymes that have promising characteristic for PON test development.