The Royal Society

Natural proteins solve problems shaped by evolution. David Baker describes a different approach: designing proteins from scratch to meet current challenges in health, technology and sustainability. His laboratory develops deep-learning methods that generate proteins with new functions, synthesizes genes encoding the designs, and experimentally characterizes the resulting molecules. The lecture explains how this design-build-test approach extends beyond modifying existing natural proteins and presents applications of computational protein design to contemporary problems. Online via the Royal Society public livestream. The lecture is free to watch live on the Royal Society’s YouTube channel.

How can bacterial and viral pathogens rapidly evolve to become more or less harmful? Kayla King examines changes in virulence across the tree of life using evolutionary theory, genome sequencing and laboratory selection experiments. The lecture considers changes occurring within weeks in response to host immunity and warming temperatures, their consequences for pathogen genomes and host health, and what they imply for predicting virulence in a changing world. It connects the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of infection with the growing risk of zoonotic spillover into humans and protected species. Online via the Royal Society public livestream. The lecture is free to watch live on the Royal Society’s YouTube channel.