NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

A two act play: The character of cells and the role of biomechanics

Dr. Barabino’s research interests are primarily focused on cellular and tissue responses to fluid mechanical forces in the context of vascular disease and orthopedic tissue engineering. She concentrates on the characterization and quantification of mechanical and biochemical cues that influence tissue growth and disease progression.

Deciphering cancer genomes and networks

Innovation by evolution: bringing new chemistry to life

Not satisfied with nature’s vast catalyst repertoire, we want to create new protein catalysts and expand the space of genetically encoded enzyme functions. I will describe how we can use the most powerful biological design process, evolution, to optimize existing enzymes and invent new ones, thereby circumventing our profound ignorance of how sequence encodes function. Using mechanistic understanding and mimicking nature’s evolutionary processes, we can generate whole new enzyme families that catalyze synthetically important reactions not known in biology.