A very warm welcome to our new group leader Noam Prywes. Noam grew up in the US and received his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard studying the origin of life and the RNA world. There he became interested in molecular evolution and decided to study the biochemistry of carbon fixation as a postdoc, first at the Weizmann Institute and then at UC Berkeley. He tells us more about himself and his plans for his new lab:
'My group will be studying the enzymology of rubisco in high throughput. Rubisco is the most abundant protein on the planet and is responsible for nearly all biological carbon fixation, primarily in plants and algae. As we get started, my group will use a designed rubisco-dependent E. coli strain as a readout for rubisco biochemistry. This strain allows for "deep mutational scanning" which involves library cloning and high throughput sequencing.
Ultimately, I am interested in the mechanisms of catalysis, the intersection of chemistry and evolution, fitness landscapes, laboratory evolution and I would like to work on plant biology and photosynthetic physiology in the future. I am absolutely thrilled to be embarking on this journey here at Biochemistry.'