Sílvia Osuna

Sílvia Osuna

Universitat de Girona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Sílvia Osuna received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Girona (UdG) at the Institut de Química Computacional (IQC). In 2010, she moved to the group of Prof. Houk at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Since then, Sílvia has worked in computational design of enzymes of medical and pharmaceutical interest. Sílvia has more than 70 research publications, and been awarded the Young Researcher award by the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (RSEQ 2016), the Research award by the Fundación Princesa de Girona (FPdGi 2016- Science category), the 2017 Young Researcher Award of EuCheMS Organic Division, and 2019 Young Researcher award by Lilly and RSEQ. Her group is funded by the European Research Council project - Starting Grant (ERC-2015- STG-679001, NetMoDEzyme), the I+D MINECO project (EnzExplora, PGC2018-102192-B-I00), and the Catalan government project for emergent research teams (2017-SGR-1701).


Research interests

Sílvia’s research lies at the interface between computational chemistry and biology. Her research focuses on the study of biochemical processes mainly related to enzyme catalysis. Her lab is developing new computational tools for predicting which amino acid changes are required to the enzyme structure for allowing novel function, enhancing a promiscuous side reaction, or expanding its substrate scope. Her goal is to enable the routine computational design of proficient enzymes to boost their use in industry for the synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant targets. She also applies the developed methodologies to the study of the recognition and assembly process of biomolecules with carbon-based materials.

Selected publications

– Curado-Carballada C, Feixas F, Iglesias-Fernandez J & Osuna S 2019, ‘Hidden Conformations in Aspergillus niger Monoamine Oxidase are Key for Catalytic Efficiency’, Angewandte Chemie-international Edition, 58, 10, 3097 – 3101.

– Tomas-Loba A, Manieri E, Gonzalez-Teran B, Mora A, Leiva-Vega L, Santamans AM, Romero-Becerra R, Rodriguez E, Pintor-Chocano A, Feixas F, Lopez JA, Caballero B, Trakala M, Blanco O, Torres JL, Hernandez-Cosido L, Montalvo-Romeral V, Matesanz N, Roche-Molina M, Bernal JA, Mischo H, Leon M, Caballero A, Miranda-Saavedra D, Ruiz-Cabello J, Nevzorova YA, Cubero FJ, Bravo J, Vazquez J, Malumbres M, Marcos M, Osuna S & Sabio G 2019, ‘p38 gamma is essential for cell cycle progression and liver tumorigenesis’, Nature, 568, 7753, 557-560.

– Semivrazhskaya O, Romero-Rivera A, Aroua S, Troyanov SI, Garcia-Borras M, Stevenson S, Osuna S & Yamakoshi Y 2019, ‘Structures of Gd3N@C80 Prato Bis-Adducts: Crystal Structure, Thermal Isomerization, and Computational Study’, Journal Of The American Chemical Society, 141, 28, 10988 – 10993.

– Maria-Solano MA, Iglesias-Fernandez J & Osuna S 2019, ‘Deciphering the Allosterically Driven Conformational Ensemble in Tryptophan Synthase Evolution’, Journal Of The American Chemical Society, 141, 33, 13049 – 13056.

– Chen X, Zhang H, Maria-Solano MA, Liu W, Li J, Feng J, Liu X, Osuna S, Guo R-T, Wu Q, Zhu D & Ma Y 2019, ‘Efficient reductive desymmetrization of bulky 1,3-cyclodiketones enabled by structure-guided directed evolution of a carbonyl reductase’, Nature Catalysis, 2, 10, 931 – 941.

– Arqué X, Romero-Rivera A, Feixas F, Patiño T*, Osuna S* & Sánchez S* 201, ‘Intrinsic enzymatic properties modulate the self-propulsion of micromotors‘, Nature Commun. 2019, 10, 2826.