Group Final Project

For this Final Project, I joined a group of students consisting of Jason Ross, Jay Handfield, Nana Agyei Afrane-Asare, Xavier-Lewis Palmer, and myself. After going through the phage reading and reviewing the bacteriophage final project goals, we opted to increase the thermodynamic stability of the Lysis Protein.

Our group’s plan for engineering a bacteriophage includes multiple steps and various protein engineering tools. First, we will use BLAST and Clustal Omega to discover amino acid residues that are conserved between Lysis protein homologs. ESM2 will be used to score mutations for their evolutionary plausibility and ESM-Fold/ProteinMPNN/Boltz-1 will be used to refine the folded protein. EvolvePro will be used to computationally direct evolution in this protein structure. Lastly, we can use computational stress-testing under varying environmental conditions to test for destabilization.

Our group’s full one page proposal is linked here.

Our results can be found in this Google Doc.