Parallax

The evolutionary geometry of protein dynamics.

Evolution interacts with the environment by moving protein residues around and selecting the top performing variants. This process has been repeated for every protein in every species that has ever evolved, leaving a large amount of ‘structural jitter’ scattered across even the most static protein family trees. Under selective pressure, the jitter concentrates on functional sites. With the advent of cheap protein structure prediction, biologists can now map, organize, and exploit this evolutionary geometry.