Origins of Allostery and Evolvability in Proteins: A Case Study

Nature creates wonderfully complex micromachines known as proteins. While much effort has gone into understanding how these machines fold into compact structures and execute their function, little is known about the principles underlying their capacity to adapt to new functions—a property that is unique to systems built through evolution.

In this paper, we presented data that argues proteins are wired to be evolvable, not necessarily just to function. We posed that studying proteins from this lens provides a clear view of where seemingly very complex features—like the capacity for long-range communication in proteins known as ‘allostery’—originate through the relatively simply mechanism of iterative selection and variation. See Ranganathan Laboratory (https://ranganathanlab.org/).