We will be having and old fashioned small group event in the North Avenue Room with Dr Eric Ortlund,
Assistant Professor. Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine. Visit the Ortlund Lab

Dr. Ortlund describes his talk below.

Some things are just too small to see. Unfortunately, these include really important things like the molecules in our body that store information and carry out work in the cell. It’s not our fault though. These things just happen to be much smaller than visible light rendering our eyes (and microscopes) useless for this task. To overcome this problem, a technique called X-ray Crystallography has been developed that allows us to see individual atoms. I will give a non-technical introduction to X-ray crystallography which has become a ubiquitous and essential tool for medical researchers to visualize enzymes, proteins, receptors, drugs, DNA and RNA. I will show how this powerful tool helps us understand biology and design better drugs. Finally, we will discuss how this approach has helped to shed light on the fundamental process of evolution – at the molecular level. The evolutionary process is driven by changes in genes sequences, which translate into changes within the sequence of proteins. A central goal in molecular evolution is to address how mutations in a gene sequence lead to a shift in function. Since a proteins function is determined by it’s three-dimensional structure, changes in genes cause their effect by modifying the three dimensional structure of proteins.

What is the structural basis for these effects? To answer this question we would need to solve the structure of an ancient protein – a molecular fossil – and this is exactly what we have done.