MUTATIONAL SCANNING UNIT

We use massive-scale experimentation and mathematical modeling to understand and predict how the biophysical properties of the molecules of life are encoded in their sequences. These fundamental encoding functions underlie all of biology with implications for our understanding of genetic diseases, evolutionary adaptation, and biomolecular engineering. To approach these problems, we use deep mutational scanning (DMS), a powerful experimental technique that allows us to systematically measure the functional effects of thousands of genetic variants in a single experiment. By combining high-throughput mutagenesis with functional selection assays and deep sequencing readouts, we create comprehensive maps of how sequence changes affect the functions and biophysical properties of biomolecules. We then use these rich, well-calibrated datasets to train predictive models to generalize beyond the proteins that we have measured.