My last contribution to the University of Groningen website in 2019: an interesting study by enzyme engineer Marco Fraaije and colleagues. They reconstructed the ancestral gene sequence for three human enzymes, expressed the protein and analyzed its structure. (The current enzymes were not stable enough to study, the ancestral ones are!) The result is an interesting paper describing the structure and function of these flavin-containing monooxygenases (FMOs).

Full paper in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. See also this Nature News & Views commentary.

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