Engineering a Formic Acid Reductase
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide The formate bioeconomy envisions production of formic acid from CO 2 via (electro-)chemical conversion, followed by conversion to the product by engineered microbes or cell-free systems. One prominent way of expanding formate valorization is its reduction to formaldehyde, making highly efficient assimilation cascades accessible. This thermodynamically challenging reaction can be catalyzed by ATP-dependent activation followed by NAD(P)H-dependent reduction. Existing solutions rely on two-step cascades, or fusion enzymes thereof, and are limited by the fast hydrolysis of their formylated intermediates. Here, we show that carboxylic acid reductase can be engineered toward formate reduction, resulting in a single-enzyme solution that does not release intermediates. In addition, we discovered that this enzyme tolerates high formate concentrations when used in Escherichia coli whole-cell conversion, conditions that strongly inhibit existing formate reduction cascades. We therefore provide a valuable addition to the toolbox of synthetic formate reduction, providing an enzyme compatible with applications amenable to high formate titers, such as whole-cell bioconversion or electrobiochemical cascades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".