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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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THIS SEMINAR WAS CANCELED DUE TO WEATHER.
Michael Hecht, Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry
Princeton University
ABSTRACT
A key goal of synthetic biology is to design novel proteins that fold and function in vivo. A particularly challenging objective would be to produce non-natural proteins that don’t merely generate interesting phenotypes, but which actually provide essential functions necessary for the growth of living cells. Successful design of such life-sustaining proteins would represent a step toward constructing “artificial proteomes” of non-natural sequences. In initial work toward this goal, we designed large libraries of novel proteins encoded by millions of synthetic genes. Many of these new proteins fold into stable 3-dimensional structures; and many bind biologically relevant metals, metabolites, and cofactors. Several of the novel proteins function in vivo providing essential activities necessary to sustain the growth of E. coli cells. In some cases, these novel proteins rewire gene regulation and alter the expression of endogenous genes. In other cases, the novel protein sustains cell growth by functioning as bona fide enzyme that catalyzes an essential biochemical reaction. These results suggest that (i) the molecular toolkit of life need not be limited to sequences that already exist in nature, and (ii) artificial genomes and proteomes might be built from non-natural sequences.
Host: Frank Rosenzweig
