From: Max Planck Inst. Marburg

Will give a seminar entitled:

Resurrecting ancients proteins to understand the biochemical past and present

Cells are filled with an astonishing variety of molecular protein complexes, which are crucial for virtually every aspect of cellular function. They are the products of a billion-years long and often erratic evolutionary process that we are only now beginning to decipher. It is our group’s my ambition to understand the evolutionary mechanisms that give rise to such molecular complexity, but also to reveal how functional innovations in individual protein complexes have changed the course of history for life on earth. To do this, we use ancestral sequence reconstruction combined with biochemical characterization of resurrected proteins. This approach uses a protein family sequence alignment, a phylogenetic tree inferred from the alignment, and a model of sequence evolution to make a probabilistic estimate of the sequences of long extinct proteins. Producing and characterizing these ancestral proteins in the lab then allows us to understand the biochemistry of the ancient past. In this talk I will give two examples of this work: the evolution of the carboxylase Rubisco and how it learned to cope better with oxygen, and the evolution of a remarkable protein assembly that is a molecular representation of the Sierpinski fractal.

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