Aitor Manteca
Protein evolution describes the process by which proteins experience changes in theiramino acid sequences over generations. These changes result in the appearance of newprotein functions and structures or modifications to existing functions. During the lasttwo decades the appearance of several computational and experimental newtechniques have allowed researchers to explore the protein sequence space during theirevolutionary process. Today, thanks to complex ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR)methods we can infer and characterize the sequence of a protein that existed more than2 billion years ago. Moreover, high-throughput screening methods such as dropletmicrofluidics enables to speed up the directed evolution of proteins, a process thatwould otherwise take thousands of years. In this talk I will describe several proteogenicmolecules that we have optimized going back or forth in time: Antimicrobial peptides,fluorescent proteins, enzymes and artificial epitopes, among others.
12.00pm, Seminar Room