Joshua ElkingtonFounder and General Partner at Axial

Frances Arnold, On evolution

Name: Frances Arnold, On evolution
Uploaded: 2024-05-24T16:19:35+00:00
Duration: 1 min
Channel: Joshua Elkington
Description: Frances Arnold explains why evolution takes indirect paths rather than direct jumps. Epistasis, the interaction between mutations, shapes these pathways…

24 May 2024 · 1 min

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Frances Arnold explains why evolution takes indirect paths rather than direct jumps. Epistasis, the interaction between mutations, shapes these pathways. Protein engineers can either create large simultaneous-mutation libraries or use machine learning to optimize limited experimental data, as a recent PNAS paper showed with four-mutation jumps.

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Very often nature can go around through another circuitous route is one answer. The other answer is that yes, epistasis, the interactions of mutations, is important, right? But evolution does not work at that level. Evolution doesn't make big jumps usually. It finds these circuitous routes. What does the evolver do, right? You can either make big simultaneous mutation libraries and screen more, or you can do really wonderful things like machine learning. So we just had a paper a couple months ago in PNAS on simultaneous mutations to identify these epistatic combinations and do jumps of 4 mutations at a time. So basically it's a numbers game, and you have to figure out how to make the best use of the small numbers you will always be getting from any experimental measurement. And it's with any optimization,