Evolutionary Biochemistry
Dr. Georg Hochberg
Research area
Cells are filled with a dazzling diversity of proteins that can seem exquisitely tuned to their functions. How did evolution produce this diversity? Is it the result millions of years of fine-tuning, or does it reflect a more erratic process that tends to produce Rube Goldberg-like machines replete with gratuitous complexity? Our lab tackles these questions using the evolution of protein complexes as our model system. We use ancestral sequence reconstruction to resurrect long extinct protein complexes and characterize their structure and function using a combination of high-resolution biophysical techniques and high-throughput characterization of protein libraries.
