Professor, Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Services, School of Pharmacy

UC San Francisco

 

 

There has been exciting progress in the computational design of proteins with new structures, highlighting the potential to advance many applications in biological engineering, as well as to provide insights into the design principles of natural protein functions. Many significant challenges remain, both in the accuracy of current computational approaches, and in the complexity of protein geometries and functions that can be designed at present. I will discuss our recent progress with computational methods and describe new approaches and their applications. Our new work includes (i) reshaping of protein conformations for reprogrammed functions, (ii) engineering small molecule binding sites de novo to detect and respond to new small molecule signals in living cells, and (iii) controlling protein shapes to create fold families for new functions.