Speaker: Gaurav Moghe, assistant professor, Plant Biology Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University

Title: "Enzyme evolution and the generation of plant metabolic diversity"

Abstract: Plants produce a staggering diversity of chemicals that are not just important to every aspect of plant biology, but also in many human applications. The Moghe Lab is interested in characterizing the multi-layered mechanisms that generate this metabolic diversity. In this talk, I will discuss our project on the large BAHD acyltransferase family, which seeks to identify how different clades with different functions arose over evolutionary timescales. I will describe results from enzymology, phylogenetic/comparative genomic and structural simulation experiments that helped characterize the ancestral state and evolution of new functions. We further identified structural features that may make this family robust and evolvable, and able to traverse a wide phytochemical space. Our research provides novel insights on how structural evolution in enzyme families contributes to generation of metabolic diversity. Moghe Lab: https://www.moghelab.org/

Host: Joe Aung, genetics, development and cell biology assistant professor

Meeting link: https://iastate.webex.com/iastate/j.php?MTID=m34263af5f01bd0c23936ce2d3fce5663

Sept. 7, 2021, GDCB Seminar flyer (Gaurav Moghe)