Center for Soft Matter Series Lecture
Biocatalysis Meets AI: The Prelude
Presenter: Professor Cui Haiyang
Abstract:
Traditional chemical catalysis dominates industrial synthesis but often faces challenges such as harsh conditions, insufficient selectivity, and environmental pollution. Enzymatic catalysis offers a highly promising alternative and complementary pathway for chemical synthesis due to its unique advantages of high efficiency, high selectivity, and green, mild conditions. However, enzyme function prediction and design remain bottlenecks hindering widespread application in this field.
This presentation will focus on leveraging deep learning technologies to push the boundaries of rational enzyme catalysis design, thereby empowering and revolutionizing traditional chemical catalytic processes. Conventional methods (e.g., sequence alignment, homology modeling) often fail when predicting low-homology, multifunctional, or novel enzyme reactions. Emerging AI tools like AlphaFold, CLEAN, and EZSpecificity successfully map protein sequences and structures to catalytic functions through advanced frameworks such as contrastive learning and graph neural networks (GNNs), achieving a paradigm shift from answering “what an enzyme is” to predicting “what an enzyme can do.” At the core of this revolution lies AI-driven enzyme engineering, which enables unprecedented speed in intelligently discovering key biocatalytic enzymes and precisely designing their catalytic efficiency and stability. This not only accelerates novel enzyme discovery but also significantly advances the “flexible” integration of biocatalytic pathways in bioprocessing and green synthesis, laying a solid foundation for constructing next-generation efficient and sustainable chemical synthesis systems.
Cui Haiyang, Professor, PhD Supervisor, Associate Dean of the School of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University; Permanent Member of the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Engineering; Young Chief Scientist of the National Coal Major Special Project; National-level Young Talent; Jiangsu Provincial Distinguished Professor. Master's degree obtained in 2016 from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Advisor: Professor Ruiting Guo). Ph.D. obtained in 2020 from RWTH Aachen University, Germany (Advisor: Professor Ulrich Schwaneberg). Postdoctoral research conducted at the Leibniz Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Materials (DWI) in Germany during the same year. 2021-2023: Postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (Advisor: Professor Zhao Huimin). Joined Nanjing Normal University in 2024 to establish the “Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology” research team and develop the Infinity supercomputing platform (Infinite Bio-Computing Cluster). Published 52 SCI papers, including 27 as first/corresponding author (Top 22 papers in Nature, Science, Angew. Chem., Nat. Commun., etc.; 7 cover articles; 4 Hot Papers); filed 7 patents with 2 granted; authored 3 independent chapters in the international authoritative series Methods in Molecular Biology. ABLab Keying Group Website: http://www.oceancuilab.com
Lecture Time: December 12, 2025, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Venue: Lecture Hall, 2nd Floor, East District Conference Center
Invited by: Zhang Yifei, Ji Yu
Contact: Li Hui (hli@buct.edu.cn)
Hosted by: High-End Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology
