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Blizard Institute Research Seminar: Professor Paola Laurino, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University

We are delighted to invite you to join the Blizard Institute Research Seminar

Published:

that will take place on Thursday 20 April 2023, 1.00-2.00pm in the Perrin Lecture Theatre. Prof. Paola Laurino, Associate Professor of organic chemistry at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan, will present “Insertions and Deletions (InDels): Hopeful monster for protein engineering?".

This is an in-person event giving participants the opportunity to meet with Prof. Laurino around some drinks and snacks after the session.

We encourage everyone to attend this seminar and look forward to seeing you there.

Abstract 

Substitutions, insertions and deletions (InDels) play a key role in the emergence of enzyme functions. However, our understanding of the role of InDels is limited compared to the one of substitution. Most protein engineering methods focus on exploring the sequence space of the fixed length while sequence space including InDels has been overlooked due to the ambiguity in evolutionary information and the difficulties in creating libraries. Herein I will present two case studies where evolution shaped enzyme activities by the use of InDels.

In the first case we choose glycoside hydrolase family 19 (GH19) chitinase as a candidate to investigate how InDels in the remote loop regions contribute to the emergence of new functions in proteins. The function of GH19 varies from chitinase activity to antifungal activity, depending on the presence/absence of loop in remote regions. In the second case we showed that the removal of three amino acids in the ancient Gly-rich loop allows the functional transition from reductase enzyme to methyltransferase in Rossman fold enzymes. Both these studies suggest how Nature use Indels to acquire new protein functions.

Biography

Professor Laurino is an organic chemist with broad interests in biochemistry and protein evolution. She was born and grew up in Italy. After pursuing a master in medicinal chemistry in the Netherlands, she started her doctoral studies in organic chemistry in ETHZ (Switzerland). During her PhD she moved to Max Plank Institute (Germany) along with her mentor and there finished her doctoral studies. As postdoctoral fellow she spent the last four years studying enzyme evolution and engineering in Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). Read more.

Professor Mary Collins
Professor of Virology
Blizard Institute Director

and

Professor William Alazawi MA(Cantab) MB BChir PhD FRCP
Professor of Hepatology

 

 

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