Projects
Integrating informational and metabolic perspectives on the evolution of cellular and genomic complexity
2026 – present
My PhD work revealed new regulatory constraints and opportunities for cell-cycle coordination of host and symbiont during the evolution of complex cells (eukaryotes). In my current role at the Kost lab, I aim to integrate these insights with metabolic perspectives, which also presents constraints and opportunities for the evolution of complexity. Information processing has a fundamental energetic cost, and so the adaptive potential of complex regulation is expected to depend on details of the system. One possibility is that populations and ecosystems evolve to distribute metabolic functions between individuals instead of evolving cells with complex metabolism and regulation.
Evolutionary dynamics of protein folding
2023 - present
RNA folding has long been studied as an example of a complex genotype-phenotype map, linking sequence to structure. With recent progress in protein structure prediction, it has also become possible to analyse the protein sequence-structure map with computational methods. Contrary to expectation, I found fundamental differences between the folding landscapes of RNA and proteins. In particular, protein structures are more robust to point mutations but show very limited evolvability. Current work is turned to characterization of protein structure evolution from natural sequence data.