Darwin Day: Frances Arnold

Heroes of Evolution Darwin Day Talk: Frances Arnold — When Engineering Meets Evolution

Long gone are the days of dustry textbooks filled with examples of evolution seeking to capture the hows and whys of species came to be on the planet. Modern biology is progressing forward MAKING evolution happen. Genes and whole organisms are made to be evolved in a flask or test tube and modern computational methods can both guide and explain the complexity that is happening. 

The primary revolutionary in this change was the scientist Frances Arnold. In her seminal work she adapted an enzyme that worked well in an aqueous environment to work well in an organic solvent by creating mutations, picking the best working ones, and mutating those, and repeating the process.  This is a technique called directed evolution and has found its way into engineering in many sectors from agriculture, pharmaceuticals, environmental remediation, and chemical synthesis just to name a few. 

For this seminal contribution she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. 

Come to this Darwin Day talk in which we celebrate the professional achievements of Frances Arnold and have an introduction to the world of directed evolution and synthetic biology. 

By Dr. Stephen L. Gasior