The Woldring lab focuses on the discovery and fundamental study of high performance binding proteins having utility as precision medicines, disease diagnostic agents, and fundamental research probes. There is a critical need for such reagents that facilitate the detection and treatment of challenging diseases; however, the rate at which they are developed by the scientific community fails to meet this demand. To address this, our research combines the power of high-throughput yeast surface display selection methods with precise structural and dynamic information. We can then leverage simulations of protein interactions to empower a feedback loop between theory and experiment to elucidate protein evolution.

Current projects include:

• Biosensor development for detecting cancer targets using tandem proteins
• Evolving highly versatile binding proteins using ancestral sequence reconstruction
• Inducing conformational changes in GPCRs via small engineered ligands
• Elucidating protein-protein interactions by library selection and simulated docking
• Discovery of clinically and industrially relevant protein sequences with machine learning