What are Enzymes for Innovation?

My name is Rich Roberts. I'm Chief Scientific Officer here at New England BioLabs. I first got associated with the company in 1975 when we started to sell restriction enzymes. At that time we sold a lot of enzymes. We had no idea whether anybody was going to use them or not. Of course, we hoped they would. The result was a great boost for the biotechnology industry.

A few years ago we realized that there were actually many enzymes that do interesting things on DNA or protein or RNA or in the glycobiology fields that were simply not commercially available. Some of them were described in the literature. Some of them had just come from bioinformatic searches. But we realized that many of these enzymes might turn out to be equally useful as tools for molecular biologists and for biotechnologists. So we made a commitment to start a new project, which we call Enzymes for Innovation.

The idea is that these are enzymes that have useful properties. They perhaps do something interesting to DNA or something interesting to RNA. They're not commercially available anywhere else. We would make them available and offer them to researchers in the field with the idea that they might do what Sydney Brenner used to do. He told me that when he got on an airplane he liked to take the New England BioLabs catalog with him and look and see what was new, what reagents were there that he didn't know about, with the idea that perhaps he could dream up some new use for them, and some way in which they might be used to make a discovery, or to develop a new method or for whatever purpose he wanted.

I know that he is not the only person who does this. There are many people who look around to see what new reagents are available. We intend to advertise those and make them available to people through our Enzymes for Innovation program.