Nicolas Doucet

Research Interests

• The main goal of our research is to successfully modify enzyme biocatalysts aimed at environmental and pharmaceutical applications, with a broader interest focused on understanding the role between structure, function and flexibility in various enzymatic systems.To address this important problem, our research strategy combines directed evolution experiments coupled with biochemical and biophysical characterization such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), molecular biology, enzyme kinetics, and molecular modeling

Current Research Projects

• To understand how the amino acid sequence and local structural environment of conserved residues determine the motional and functional properties of enzymes.
• To investigate how functionally and structurally related enzymes retain their motional properties within similar folds.
• To modify, reproduce and apply this ‘structure-function’ and ‘flexibility-function’ information to the design of new and improved molecular biocatalysts.

Tools and Expertises

• Molecular Modeling, Molecular Dynamics, Molecular Docking, Thermodynamics, Statistical Mechanics