The Big Picture

A fundamental property of proteins is their capacity to display allostery, or free-energy coupling between two distal sites. Allosteric regulation is vital to countless molecular and cellular responses, yet the principles underlying the physical mechanism for allostery remain poorly understood. How is allostery encoded in the linear amino acid sequence, and what are the implications for this at the level of the organism at which selection acts? My work will allow us to answer these questions using the powerful experimental system of the InaD scaffolding complex found in the Drosophila melanogaster compound eye in order to map the relationship of genotype to molecular phenotype to cellular physiology and organismal behavior.