Evolutionary Clues to Protein Kinase Regulatory Mechanisms

Jan 17, Thu 2007
2:30 pm, 2023 Haworth

Natarajan Kannan

University of California, San Diego

Protein kinases are a large and diverse family of proteins that have evolved a variety of regulatory mechanisms to respond to diverse activation signals in signaling pathways. Understanding mechanisms in atomic detail is essential to design therapeutic strategies for diseases that are associated with abnormal regulation of protein kinase activity. While we have made great progress in structurally characterizing several protein kinase families, we are still far from fully understanding the regularity diversity of the protein kinase machinery. In this talk, I will describe an evolutionary approach to study protein kinase structure and function. Specifically, I will describe how extracting and analyzing the evolutionary information embedded in genomic sequences allows us to formulate testable hypothesis regarding the underlying mechanisms of the protein kinase machinery. Using specific examples, I will illustrate how an evolutionary approach complements existing experimental efforts to study protein structure and function.