Combinatorial Structure and Function Studies

Through billions of years of evolution, Nature has developed an enormously versatile array of intricate "machines " which are both the product and an essential component of what we call Life. These molecular machines, or proteins, are all composed of the same twenty building blocks (i.e., amino acids) arranged in different ways, like beads on a string. In recent years much effort has been spent to understand how a chain of amino acids in solution achieves a single conformation allowing it to bind other molecules or catalyze chemical reactions. Strategies which attempt to mimic and accelerate the evolutionary process which has given rise to the proteins we observe in Nature have successfully been used to engineer proteins. These strategies all have in common the construction of an ensemble of different proteins from which a functional protein with a desired property is selected. Through molecular genetic techniques, the ensemble of proteins is made diverse by introducing different combinations of amino acids at a few key positions in the polypeptid