Martín Floor receives the Horitzó Àsia grant for a research stay at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Martín Floor, a researcher in the Research Group in Bioinformatics and Medical Statistics of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology at the UVic-UCC, today received the Horitzó Asia Grant of 2,550 Euros, which will enable him to undertake a research stay at the Arieh Warsherl Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen.

The grant, awarded by Vic City Council as part of the Horitzó Asia project, which it organises jointly with the UVic-UCC and the Nits de Cinema Oriental Film Festival, was presented by Susagna Roura, the Councillor for Culture of Vic City Council, accompanied by Àngels Crusellas, the General Secretary of the UVic-UCC, and Joan Masnou, the vice-rector for International Relations and Continuing Education.

Susagna Roura said that "as an city of education, Vic aims to contribute to the development of the region and to build a bridge between the East and the West”. She also added that "without the work done by the Nits de Cinema Oriental Film Festival, we would undoubtably not be awarding this grant today." Meanwhile, Joan Masnou expressed gratitude to Vic City Council for two reasons: "for awarding this grant, and for bringing together all the institutions that worked separately with Asia in the Horitzó Asia Project, which has helped create many synergies."

Àngels Crusellas highlighted the importance of this grant, which involves "making sending students to Asian universities every year to complete studies a normal situation", since the grant aims to promote the establishment of future relationships with other universities and research centres in Asia, and to promote the joint supervision of doctoral theses, to encourage the economic, social, educational and cultural development of the city and the territory. Students on master's degree and doctorate programmes at the UVic-UCC are eligible to apply for the grant.

Seeking new enzymes of industrial and environmental interest

Martín Floor's doctoral thesis project is based on the computational design of new enzymes of industrial and environmental interest. Enzymes are proteins that cells use to accelerate chemical processes which would otherwise be too slow to be used by a living being. Evolution has refined these molecular machines to almost perfect levels, through the simple concept of trial and error. "Unfortunately, we still do not know all the details, although we have recently been able to improve our knowledge about the relationship between the structure of enzymes and their function, which has allowed us to start generating artificial versions of the enzymes that catalyse specific chemical reactions," explains Floor.

The Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics Laboratory, which is part of the Research Group in Bioinformatics and Medical Statistics (BEM) of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology at the UVic-UCC, works towards an understanding of how to build new enzymes by designing variants that do not exist in nature, and which have practical applications in various knowledge areas. The characteristics of these enzymes enable these scenarios to be monitored and optimised with high levels of efficiency, open up a new universe of opportunities for innovation.

The BEM research group's network of international collaborators contains several experts in the field of computational chemistry and enzymology, including Dr Jenn-Kang Hwang, of the Arieh Warshel institute at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen, which has extensive experience in developing computational methodologies to understand the evolution of proteins. This Horitzó Asia grant will establish close cooperation with Dr Hwang, aimed at optimising the engineering of these molecular machines.
For Martín Floor, "receiving this grant is an unexpected honour, and a great opportunity on both a personal and a professional level to be able to work with an important project and with one of the leading computational biology centres worldwide."