New Publication

Ben and Colin have recently contributed to a paper entitled ‘Structural reconstruction of protein ancestry’ in PNAS. In this work done with Daniel Christ’s group and other collaborators, laboratory evolution and X-ray crystallography were used to recreate and characterise homodimeric forms of antigen receptors. The findings of this work provide molecular insights and support of long-held theories concerning the evolution of the adaptive immune system. They also provide a blueprint for the experimental reconstruction of ancestral proteins in the large number of cases in which evolution has obscured sequence similarities beyond recognition, and which cannot be analyzed using current sequence-based approaches.