Researchers at the Baker Lab, part of the Institute for Protein Design (IPD), recently made a breakthrough in learning how proteins interact and co-evolve with each other to carry out biological functions.
Postdoctoral fellow and project lead Qian Cong plans to continue using comparative genomics to study how proteins compose organisms. The scholars involved in this project are looking forward to applying computational biology methods to model unknown proteins and potentially develop better treatment against pathogens.
“There are many, many new proteins, but we don’t know what those new proteins are doing and we don’t know how proteins function together to make up organisms,” Cong said. “This is a way to just use this explosion of genomic data to figure out what proteins interact. If you know what proteins interact, then maybe it will help you to figure out how proteins … function.”
