PICT-ICEO Platform

Engineering and Screening for Original Enzymes

PICT-ICEO "Engineering and Screening for Original Enzymes" is dedicated to the isolation and characterization of new enzymatic activities from natural biodiversity screening (microbial collections or metagenomic libraries) and from libraries of variants obtained by rational and/or combinatorial protein engineering.

The mission of the platform is to discover new catalysts and/or to adapt/optimise them to industrial constraints for the development of new processes, and to provide the methodologies and expertise necessary for the biochemical and biophysical characterisation of these new enzymes.

The PICT-ICEO platform is composed of three technical facilities:

a high-throughput enzymatic screening platform dedicated to diversity creation, development of screening methods, library screening and hit selection;
an analytical platform dedicated to the characterisation of the reaction products of studied catalysts;
a platform dedicated to the purification and biophysical characterisation of studied proteins.

PICT-ICEO works in close association with the "Molecular Catalysis and Enzyme Engineering" (CIMEs) research team.

Analysis of reaction products of enzymes

High Throughput Screening

Microfluidic

Purification and biophysical characterisation of enzymes

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Expertises

Services and skills

Characterisation of reaction products of enzymes
Biochemical : the biochemical and biophysical characterisation

Scientific objectives

Our scientific objectives are therefore to:

participate in increasing the understanding of i) the links between gene diversity and enzyme functionality and ii) the functioning of genomes and metagenomes;
develop an integrated approach for the total analysis of enzymes, exploiting sequence, structure, dynamics and activity;
contribute to the enrichment of 3D structure databases through the identification of new architectural motifs and original catalytic configurations, resulting from structural metagenomics projects;
to accelerate the construction of catalysts for synthetic biology and the construction of new metabolic pathways.

State-of-the-art range of equipment

To do this, we rely on a state-of-the-art range of equipment:

automated colony picking machines allowing the organization of mutant libraries in microplate format,
integrated liquid handling stations, dedicated to the phenotypic screening of variant libraries in microplate format,
a microfluidic system to create single/double emulsion for ultra-high-throughput screening in micrometric size droplets,
FPLC systems to purify recombinant enzymes,
a set of biophysical equipment (fluorometer, circular dichroism, nanoDSF) to determine preliminary biophysical parameters of enzyme of interest,
liquid and gas chromatography systems coupled to different types of detectors (UV, refractometry, charged aerosol detector, mass spectrometer) for enzyme product analysis.

Service offer

PICT-ICEO is open to the local, national and international academic and industrial scientific community.
Depending on the demand and complexity of the project, these services can be provided in three different ways
- provision of equipment,
- the provision of services
- cooperation contract

Certification

The PICT-ICEO platform is ISO 9001:2016 and NFX 50-900 certified.