13/10/2025
We’re thrilled to share this cutting-edge research within an international project involving Prof. Miguel Alcalde and David González Pérez from the Instituto de Catálisis y Petroleoquímica (ICP-CSIC) team.
The work, recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Chemical Biology, details how an extinct ancestral enzyme was ‘resurrected’ and ‘evolved’, achieving its potential application in cancer prevention and neurobiology research.
The team focused on an ancestral fungal laccase. This enzyme had to be sequenced, produced from modern cells, and then optimized through directed evolution to achieve its remarkable biomedical properties.
The engineered enzyme can now act as a marker for surface membrane proteins in mammalian cells. This allows for exploration of changes during T-cell activation in the presence of tumors. Furthermore, electron microscopy analyses showed the enzyme’s ability to visualize the superficial delineation between neurons.
These results highlight the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration, involving Professor Alice Ting’s probing molecular and cellular networks team from Stanford University, and proteomics experts from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), among others.
Congratulations to the entire team for opening new frontiers in biomedicine!
Read the full publication here!
Also, check out the CSIC press release and watch Miguel Alcalde’s video!