Bioinformatics Seminar

Thursday , February 19,  4:00pm,  Lecture Hall (room 135), Golden LEAF Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center
Speaker:Dr. Jeffrey Bond, University of Vermont
Title:Evolution of sequence, structure, and substrate specificity in three families of DNA repair enzymes
or
Doff thy name: A tale of a really old family feud
Abstract:The evolutionary history of three families of enzymes, Nth, Ogg, and Fpg/Nei, includes changing and overlapping roles in DNA base excision repair. We constructed phylogenies of these families based on amino acid sequences. The events of particular interest, however, are not in amino acid identities but in latent roles in structure and substrate specificity. Structural biologists, for example, interpret sequence alignments in terms of structural roles involving multiple amino acids, for example, a Zinc finger or salt bridge. First, I will describe the application of methods based on those developed by Xun Gu to our sequence phylogenies for the purpose of identifying changes in such roles during evolution. Collaborations with the Doublié and Wallace laboratories at UVM added information about natural variation in structure and substrate specificity to our sequence phylogenies. Second, then, I will describe co-evolving sets of amino acids in the context of variation in structure and substrate specificity across the phylogenies.

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