Our Faculty

Rama Ranganathan, MD PhD

The Problem:



Evolution produces systems that display remarkable structural and functional properties that can rival or exceed the performance of man-made systems. For example, protein molecules fold spontaneously into precise, well-ordered structures and can carry out specific binding, catalysis of difficult chemical reactions, and allosteric regulation. At a larger spatial scale, networks of proteins assemble to form metabolic and signaling systems that show efficient and selective processing of material and information. These performance characteristics can coexist with robustness to random perturbation and the capacity to adapt to new functional states as conditions of selection vary in the environment. The goal of our laboratory is to understand the design principles that underlie structure, function, and adaptation in biological systems. For maximal experimental and theoretical power, we focus at the atomic to cellular scale.



The Strategy:



Our approach is to break the problem down into three essential tasks: (1) to define the pattern of constraints that specify biological systems, (2) to determine the underlying physics, and (3) to understand the generative process that produces these (and not other) architectures. In other words, we wish to understand what nature has built, how it works, and why it is built the way it is. Answers to these core questions lie at the essence of understanding and engineering biological systems, and more fundamentally, to explain how they are even possible through the random, algorithmic process that we call evolution. Read more about the three core directions and about current problems being addressed in our laboratory... .

BioCARS: Synchrotron facility for probing structural dynamics of biological macromolecules.
BioCARS: Synchrotron facility for probing structural dynamics of biological macromolecules. Struct Dyn. 2024 Jan; 11(1):014301.
PMID: 38304444

ProtWave-VAE: Integrating Autoregressive Sampling with Latent-Based Inference for Data-Driven Protein Design.
ProtWave-VAE: Integrating Autoregressive Sampling with Latent-Based Inference for Data-Driven Protein Design. ACS Synth Biol. 2023 Dec 15; 12(12):3544-3561.
PMID: 37988083

Undersampling and the inference of coevolution in proteins.
Undersampling and the inference of coevolution in proteins. Cell Syst. 2023 03 15; 14(3):210-219.e7.
PMID: 36693377

Roadmap on biology in time varying environments.
Roadmap on biology in time varying environments. Phys Biol. 2021 05 17; 18(4).
PMID: 33477124

100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: Data-Driven Protein Design.
100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: Data-Driven Protein Design. ACS Macro Lett. 2021 03 16; 10(3):327-340.
PMID: 35549066

RNA sectors and allosteric function within the ribosome.
RNA sectors and allosteric function within the ribosome. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 08 18; 117(33):19879-19887.
PMID: 32747536

An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes.
An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science. 2020 07 24; 369(6502):440-445.
PMID: 32703877

Learning the pattern of epistasis linking genotype and phenotype in a protein.
Learning the pattern of epistasis linking genotype and phenotype in a protein. Nat Commun. 2019 09 16; 10(1):4213.
PMID: 31527666

Putting Evolution to Work.
Putting Evolution to Work. Cell. 2018 11 29; 175(6):1449-1451.
PMID: 30500528

Hierarchical Organization Endows the Kinase Domain with Regulatory Plasticity.
Hierarchical Organization Endows the Kinase Domain with Regulatory Plasticity. Cell Syst. 2018 10 24; 7(4):371-383.e4.
PMID: 30243563

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