Giorgio Careri Memorial Lectures: The Biophysics of Protein Evolution

by Dr Ugo Bastolla (Centro de Biologia Molecular Severo Ochoa (CSIC_UAM) Madrid, Spain)

Tuesday 16 May 2017, 16:30 → 18:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica - Edificio G. Marconi)

Natural proteins are the product of mutational forces and of selective forces that act on their physical properties, such as native dynamics, which underlies catalysis and allosteric regulation, and, for folded proteins, stability of the native state against both unfolded and misfolded state, and folding rate. I shall give a few examples of how mathematical models of these physical properties help to detect how and to which extent selection acts on them. On the other hand, molecular evolution can be modelled as a statistical mechanical problem in the space of protein sequences, modulated by effective population size and by mutational biases. The resulting model can be applied to phylogenetic inference from multiple sequence alignments and helps rationalizing correlations in the evolution of protein families.