Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics graduate student Tyler Starr and professor Joseph Thornton (Ecology and Evolution) have published a paper in Nature that uses an ancient protein to reconstruct the evolutionary paths not taken.
"By comparing what happened in history to all the other paths that could have produced the same result, we saw how idiosyncratic evolution is," said Starr. The study is the first to use deep mutational scanning on reconstructed ancestral proteins.
Read more on Science Life and on phys.org.