Invited Presentation: Adventures in Rational Protein Design: Goldilocks and the Bears

Nature’s principal machinery (proteins) offers great promise toward the future development of useful biological electronic devices, novel therapeutics and conditional enzymatic function. We seek to engineer novel, non-natural proteins of tailored function for high impact applications — while advancing our fundamental knowledge of protein structure function relationships. Protein engineering applies the fundamental principles of biophysics and biochemistry toward design, and is best achieved through an integrated (iterative) experimental and computational framework. Our current protein engineering efforts toward enzymes that function under non-physiological conditions includes, temperature-adpated enzymes, protein scaffolds capable of biological charge transfer, proteins that regulate gene expression networks, and proteins that are structurally and functionally resistant to oxidative stress.