Research

Protein biochemistry

Protein Design

Natural proteins often show new behaviours when taken out of their in vivo environment and put into simplified in vitro systems. While these “Hidden Protein Functions” are of great evolutionary interest, they depict a major obstacle on our way towards a minimal cell. Recently, we have started to instead computationally de novo design proteins customised for our synthetic systems. In a theory-driven approach, we now first hypothesise which properties a protein needs to have to give rise to a specific function in vitro, second design proteins implementing these properties, and third produce and test them experimentally.