Professor Dame Janet Thornton, <\/b>European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Cambridge<\/b>
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\nTuesday 13th November, 1.00 p.m., Stacey Lecture Theatre 1<\/b><\/p>\n
We seek to understand how enzymes work and how they evolve to perform new enzyme functions using computational biology approaches.<\/p>\n
Almost all domains that perform catalysis have evolved to work on numerous substrates. We have generated family trees, showing the evolution of these new specificities, and gaining a broad overview of enzyme evolution as we know it today. But we find that each family is different and careful analysis is required to understand individual mechanisms. In this talk I will focus on three practical topics relevant to understanding enzyme catalysis:-<\/p>\n
(1) Annotating ligands in enzymes in the PDB<\/p>\n
(2) Analysis of basic catalytic machinery in proteins<\/p>\n
(3) describing a new way to estimate substrate transformations and find the most appropriate enzymes or pathways to transform a given substrate into a given product.<\/p>\n
These methods will allow us to analyse complex enzyme families and their evolution to perform new functions and maybe ultimately help in the design of new enzymes.<\/p>\n