Texas Scientists Enlist a Drug Discovery Technique to Find Carbon Capture Proteins in the Battle Against Global Warming

Scientists in Texas are reporting that a technique used in the search for new drugs could also be used in the quest to discover new, environmentally friendly materials for fighting global warming. Such materials could be used to capture the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and other fixed sources before it enters the biosphere. The new study appears in ACS' bi-monthly journal Energy & Fuels.

Michael Drummond and colleagues Angela Wilson and Tom Cundari note that greener carbon-capture technologies are a crucial component in mitigating climate change. Existing technology is expensive and can generate hazardous waste. They point out that proteins, however, can catalyze reactions with carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, in an environmentally friendly way. That fact got the scientists interested in evaluating the possibility of using proteins in carbon capture technology.

In the study, they used the pharmacophore concept to probe how the 3-dimensional structure of proteins affects their ability to bind and capture carbon dioxide. The German chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Ehrlich, who originated the concept a century ago, defined a pharmacophore as the molecular framework that carries the key features responsible for a drug's activity. The scientists concluded that the approach could point the way to the development of next-generation carbon capture technologies.

Successful sequestration of emitted carbon dioxide is a crucial ingredient in addressing rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, but current CO₂ capture technologies are often corrosive and can generate hazardous waste. Inspiration for more environmentally friendly sequestration is sought in Nature by searching for common patterns by which proteins bind CO₂. Specifically, three-dimensional functional group patterns responsible for binding CO₂ are extracted from the few protein−CO₂ complexes that have been characterized by X-ray crystallography.

These motifs are used to generate pharmacophore-type queries, which are utilized in database mining efforts to locate similar binding motifs in a test set of enzymes that do not have an experimentally determined CO₂ binding site. These predicted carbon dioxide binding sites are often located within the active site cleft. Moreover, some of these identified CO₂-binding functional group patterns are found across various species and enzyme classes. Potential applications of the pharmacophore-based methodology are also discussed in the article.

ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Toward Greener Carbon Capture Technologies: A Pharmacore-Based Approach to Predict CO2 Binding Sites in Proteins"

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http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef901132v

CONTACT:
Michael L. Drummond, Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry
University of North Texas
Denton, Texas 76201
Email: drummondml@gmail.com