L. Aravind Iyer and the Protein Universe

Dr. L. Aravind Iyer is a Senior Investigator with the Computational Biology Branch within the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). He and his group are conducting research aimed at unraveling the interactions between evolutionary forces and various molecular constraints in shaping the diversity of biochemical function and biological form. Audio-described version:    • (Audio Described) L. Aravind Iyer and the ...   https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/rese... Video transcript: [Iyer] “Early in my life I wanted to be a paleontologist. And that's what actually led me to molecular biology. At one level I could say that I wish to understand the entire protein universe. Proteins can be divided into evolutionary units. There's a part of a protein that's preserved over evolution. because natural selection is maintaining that part for some reason. And one realization which dawned on us starting around the early nineties, and this was a very profound realization for all of biology, is that there is a relatively small number of these evolutionary units of proteins, which we term domains, which constitutes the entire protein universe of all organisms across the tree of life. If we can understand the functions of these units than that goes a long way towards understanding what organisms do. And given there are many gaps in our understanding of what organisms do. One way to get at it is to first, find all these domains. The second aspect of it is predicting functions for them. The first phase of my research we captured most of the low-hanging fruit, which were the big families conserved across all organisms. Now we are moving on to the more difficult terrain, but the difficult terrain also holds a lot of promise because many un-understood functions are hiding within that difficult terrain, and it gives these off-shoots, in the form of biotechnological reagents. There are things like restriction enzymes, the CRISPR systems and DNA modification systems. All of these have become very popular reagents. NLM is a world leader in the analysis of protein sequences, protein structures, and inferring evolution from these bits of information. And this has been a very long-standing interest of mine so, this is the place to be.”