Geoff von Maltzahn, Molly Gibson, Avak Kahvejian, Gevorg Grigoryan (Flagship)

FL56+FL57= in­fi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties? Flag­ship's hy­brid start­up takes ma­chine learn­ing in drug dis­cov­ery to the next lev­el — and Covid-19 of­fers a quick test

On his fac­ul­ty di­rec­to­ry page at Dart­mouth, Gevorg Grig­o­ryan is un­equiv­o­cal about his key fas­ci­na­tion: “un­der­stand­ing the lan­guage of pro­teins.”

For the long­time re­searcher of com­pu­ta­tion­al pro­tein de­sign, it means un­cov­er­ing the gen­er­al­iz­able prin­ci­ples that gov­ern the struc­ture of bi­ol­o­gy’s fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks. A com­pre­hen­sive sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of all the mol­e­cules in the Pro­tein Da­ta Bank back in 2016 yield­ed the key in­sight that pro­teins of­ten trans­fer in­for­ma­tion in cer­tain de­sign el­e­ments dubbed ter­tiary struc­tur­al mo­tifs.

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