| We are currently witnessing a remarkable convergence of our physical and material technologies with the worlds of biology. Genome sequence information is leading us ever closer to the most fundamental structural and functional secrets of living organisms. Dominant among them is the realization that the complex structures of biology seem remarkably, almost magically, to self-assemble. From vesicle formation, to protein folding and ribosome assembly, to the organogenesis of multicellular organisms, both macromolecular sequence information as well as instructions for self- assembly are encoded within the genome.
The David G. Lynn Group at Emory University works to understand the structures and forces that enable supramolecular self-assembly, how chemical information can be stored and translated into new molecular entities, and how the forces of evolution can be harnessed in new structures with new function. Such knowledge offers tremendous promise for discoveries in fields as diverse as drug design and genome engineering, pathogenesis and genome evolution, functional nanoscale materials and the origins of living systems. A few specific projects and the people involved are listed above in the order of increasing scale. |