Should science education begin only at school? Agnieszka Wojtkiewicz from our laboratory believes it should start much earlier. At MLBKE, we work daily on research involving enzymes — often derived from bacteria — that are applied in modern catalytic processes and biotechnology. Alongside our scientific work, we are also actively engaged in science communication, from Open Days to participation in events such as the Małopolska Night of Scientists. One such initiative is the c

Between the 19th and 21st of April, we held a Consortium Meeting of the W-biocat project at the Jerzy Haber Institute of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry, PAS, in Kraków, Poland. We started on Sunday evening with a get-together meeting at the hotel. The next day, we spent many hours summarising the entire year of joint research in our newly prepared hybrid-mode seminar room. This was followed by a trip to see Old Town in Kraków with a special focus on the Wawel Castle, a forme

After 17 months of reviewing struggle, we finally managed to publish our paper in Biochemistry . The paper describes a very complex mechanism of benzylsuccinate synthase studied by QM:MM and microkinetic analysis that is able to predict enantiospecificity of the enzyme. What is interesting here is that it is not (only) the binding pose of the substrate that determines the final product's chiral structure, but also kinetics. The pathway leading to the wrong enantiomer is simpl