Following up on yesterday's post about the vast universe of protein sequence space. I mentioned Dan Dennett's brilliant Library of Mendel, itself a subset of the famous Library of Babel.

Today I go more deliberately through the Library of Babel concept, and rename the protein library to The Library of Maynard Smith. (Frances Arnold at Caltech already did that, more than 10 years ago!)

#EvolutionIsEasy
#ProteinEvolution
#blaugust2023
#scienceblogging
#AdaptiveWalk

https://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/2023/08/contemplating-libraries-in-biology-not.html

Yet evolution has found thousands of functional proteins, some marvels of design.

Evolution is easy.

2/2

#proteinevolution
#blaugust2023

https://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-library-of-possible-proteins-is.html

According to the Boston Consulting Group increasing the global market share of alternative proteins from 2% to 8% by 2030 could yield an emissions reduction equivalent to decarbonising 95% of the aviation industry. #ClimateChange #proteinevolution #BCG

#InDels reshape #coenzyme specificity in #Rossmann #fold #enzymes from NAD-binding to SAM-binding

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207965119

#proteinengineering #proteinevolution #catalysis #moleculardynamics #xraycrystallography #PNAS

I'm an evolutionary biologist studying floral traits in the plant families #Plantaginaceae and #Solanaceae. I've done a lot of hopping between sub-fields. My background is in #Biochemistry and #ProteinEvolution. PhD work on the evolution of binding specificity following #GeneDuplication. Postdoctoral work on #FlowerColor #Phylogenomics #MetabolicPathway evolution and #AdaptiveIntrogression. Broader goal is understanding #EvolutionaryProcesses and outcomes across #ScalesOfBiologicalOrganization.

Research retrospective for mastodon! Here is the paper that really started it all for my lab. In it, we introduce our extremely weird, but also very useful, way of doing Hydrogen Deuterium Exchange Mass Spectromerty to study rapid protein conformational dynamics.

Since then, we've applied this technique to study #proteinevolution , support drug development in #Alzheimer's and #cancer and to improve #epitopemapping .

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac300365u

#massspec #teammassspec #massspectrometry #science