AI-Guided Loop Accelerates Automated Enzyme Engineering

Researchers present REAP (Rank-guided Exploration for Automated enzyme reProgramming), a closed-loop AI-automation platform that uses a RankReg hybrid loss to learn from experimental feedback, enabling adaptive learning from single mutations to productive combinatorial variants. Applied to cytochrome P450 BM3 and SaSrtA, REAP achieved a 57-fold improvement in one case and up to 104-fold enhancement in the other, demonstrating a scalable, generalizable framework for fast biocatalyst discovery and enzyme-enabled synthesis.