By Karsten Eastman | January 19, 2026
Enzymes once viewed as rigid specialists are now being repurposed as modular tools, revealing latent chemical capabilities and enabling new approaches to molecule construction.
Decades of enzymological research framed active sites as fussy and narrowly tuned, built to recognize one substrate and do one job. New research is overturning that dogma, showing that many well-characterized enzymes harbor the capacity for radically new-to-nature chemistry, and drug discovery is just starting to exploit it.