Danny Diaz: Learning how Evolution Engineers Proteins

Protein engineering enables scientists to address medical, chemical, and environmental issues by converting natural proteins into biotechnologies. Currently, this process is more stochastic than deterministic and often fails to generate proteins sufficient for commercializations. However, nature has been evolving proteins for nearly 4 billion years with tremendous success. Here, we present novel machine learning techniques designed to capture how nature evolves proteins and demonstrate their ability to accelerate the engineering of protein-based biotechnologies.