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 120 research publications, and been recently awarded the 2025 Banco Sabadell Foundation Award for Sciences and Engineering, 2025 BIOTRANS junior award, 2023 Premio Nacional de Investigación - María Teresa Toral award, 2023 Societat Catalana de Química - talent jove award, 2021 EuChemS lecture award, the Catalan National Research Award – Young Talent 2019 from Fundació Catalana de Recerca i Innovació (FCRi), among others. Her group is currently funded by the European Research Council project - Consolidator Grant (ERC-2022-CoG-101088032), ERC- Proof of Concept (ERC-2022-POC-101112805), Spanish MINECO project (PID2024-155349NB-I00).
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, and more recently for medical applications.
Selected publications
- Doustmohammadi H Sanchez J Mahato DR & Osuna S 2025, 'Evolution Enhances Kemp Eliminase Activity by Optimizing Oxyanion Stabilization and Conformational Flexibility', Chemistry-a european journal, 31-6.
- Staar S, Estévez-Gay M, Kaspar F, Osuna S & Schallmey A 2025, 'Engineering of Conserved Sequence Motif 1 Residues in Halohydrin Dehalogenase HheC Simultaneously Enhances Activity, Stability, and Enantioselectivity', Acs catalysis, 15 - 7 - 5257 - 5272.
- Kinateder T, Drexler L, Duran C, Osuna S & Sterner R 2025, 'A naturally occurring standalone TrpB enzyme provides insights into allosteric communication within tryptophan synthase', Protein science, 34 - 4 -e70103.
- Zarifi N, Asthana P, Doustmohammadi H, Klaus C, Sanchez J, Hunt SE, Rakotoharisoa RV, Osuna S, Fraser JS & Chica RA 2025, 'Distal mutations enhance catalysis in designed enzymes by facilitating substrate binding and product release', Nature communications, 16 - 1 - 8662.
- Li J, Duran C, Pográny B, Cornish K, Cartwright J, Osuna S, Unsworth WP & Grogan G 2025, 'Divergent Oxidation Reactions of E- and Z-Allylic Primary Alcohols by an Unspecific Peroxygenase', Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. vol. 64-12-e2024222241
- Amaro RE et al., 2025 'The need to implement FAIR principles in biomolecular simulations', Nature methods, 22 - 4 - 641 - 645.
Selected research activities
I have contributed with plenary/keynote talks at the following conferences: ECI conference on Enzyme Engineering, Gordon research conference on Protein Engineering, Junior Award lecture at BIOTRANS, Elixir Conference, WetLab meets DryLab workshop, among others. I have been recognized with the Banco Sabadell Foundation Award for Sciences and Engineering (2025; link), and BIOTRANS Junior Award (2025).