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Subject: CMNS Distinguished Woman Faculty Lecture Description: Patricia Babbitt Professor Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences University of California, San Francisco Title: How has nature evolved the enzymes required by living systems? Friday March 25, 2016 12:00 noon 1103 Bioscience Research building Abstract: The natural catalytic repertoire includes hundreds of functionally diverse enzyme superfamilies, each comprised of thousands of sequences and many different chemical reactions. Studies of some of these superfamilies suggest that they have evolved using "privileged" scaffolds, structural templates whose structural folds and active site architectures facilitate catalysis of common partial reactions or other chemical capabilities. Evolutionary divergence of the ancestral forms of these scaffolds are then thought to have lead to the variations in topology, active site architecture, and specificity determinants that are seen in contemporary superfamily members that catalyze quite different chemical reactions. Using protein similarity networks, we have computationally investigated on a global scale structure-function relationships in several of these superfamilies. Mapping many types of functional information to these networks enables a large-scale view of functional trends from the context of sequence and structure similarity. Interactive exploration of the networks provide clues for prediction of function for proteins of unknown function as well as offering a new and powerful context for probing how nature has remodeled these structures to enable new chemistry. We describe what we have learned from investigation of a varied set of these superfamilies and provide examples for how the results can be applied to guide the choice of informative targets for biochemical and structural characterization and, using evolutionary lessons from nature, to inform protein engineering in the lab. Contact Person: Gene Ferrick Contact Email: [log in to unmask] Website URL: http://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/events/3444