Drew Bryant, Predicting protein binding specificity by combinatorial clustering of residue position subsets

Gene duplication has resulted in organisms carrying many copies of a single ancestral protein-coding sequence. These duplicates have then diverged and evolved separately over time, allowing for the individual duplicates to acquire distinct molecular specializations and functions, especially within their small molecule binding sites. In this talk I will present a newly developed method for identifying specificity determining mutations among these homologous proteins that can then be used to predict the binding specificity of proteins with unknown function.