At noon on April 30, 2025, the Zhangjiang Advanced Research Institute successfully held the eighth Lü Zhihe Scholars Salon at the café on the first floor of Building 6 in the Lü Zhihe Science Park. Associate Professor Ni Jun from the Synthetic Science Center was invited as the keynote speaker, with his talk titled “Rational Design and Application of Artificial Multi-Enzyme Complexes.” More than 30 researchers, scientific teams, and doctoral students from various center platforms participated. The event was chaired by Executive Dean Tian Changlin.

Tian Changlin briefly introduced Ni Jun’s academic background and praised the significant scientific progress made by the resident scientists of the park, including Ni Jun, since the beginning of the year. He highlighted synthetic biology as a highly regarded new productive force both in China and abroad. Tian hoped the salon would not only showcase cutting-edge research but also foster collaboration opportunities among participants.

Ni Jun delivered an insightful lecture on the topic of “Rational Design and Application of Artificial Multi-Enzyme Complexes.” His team leveraged high-throughput testing and spatial structure prediction to analyze structure-function relationships. They decoded how spatial proximity among enzymes affects catalytic efficiency, discovering that spatial distance and channel angles are key influencing factors. Based on this, the team developed a rational design tool named iMARS, which can rapidly predict the relative activity of artificial multi-enzyme complexes from amino acid sequences. This advancement represents a shift from trial-and-error to rational design in multi-enzyme assembly and was published earlier this year in the prestigious journal Cell.

The event saw active discussion, with faculty and students engaging in cross-disciplinary exchanges. Ni Jun shared technical bottlenecks, recent breakthroughs, and future directions of his team’s work. Discussions also focused on interdisciplinary collaboration mechanisms with researchers from different platforms. Technical leaders from local synthetic biology companies also attended and participated in heated discussions on industrial applications.

This salon deepened participants’ understanding of the frontiers of synthetic biology and sparked new academic inspiration. It is hoped that faculty and students will use this event as a springboard to explore uncharted scientific territories, exchange ideas across teams, and reach new heights in their research endeavors.

About the Lü Zhihe Scholars Salon

The Lü Zhihe Scholars Salon is a signature event organized by the Zhangjiang Advanced Research Institute to foster a strong academic atmosphere of interdisciplinary innovation. Focused on frontier scientific topics and interdisciplinary trends, the salon encourages exchange and inspiration among faculty and students. It aims to build an open, dynamic academic platform to stimulate creative ideas and promote groundbreaking research through intellectual collisions.