Today Nature published graduate student Tyler Starr’s magnum opus*, Alternative evolutionary histories in the sequence space of an ancient protein. The paper reports on the first application of deep mutational scanning to a reconstructed ancestral protein. This approach allowed us to compare the genetic history the protein followed during its evolution to millions of alternate roads it could have taken, but did not. Lora Picton, our wonderful former lab manager and research scientist, is also a coauthor.
The electronic version of the paper is here, the pdf here, and the UChicago press release right here.
* This Latin phrase translates roughly as “four years of experiments in four journal pages.”