Identify potential sites of ribosome specialisation and determine common mechanisms across eukaryotes.
Theme 1 focuses on uncovering common routes to specialisation across all of eukaryotic life: cracking the “ribosome code”.
We will generate hypotheses of sequence-driven specialisation using conserved evolutionary features in RPs and associated proteins. This will be achieved using novel phylogenomics approaches designed for this project and large scale genome data analytics. We will extract key evolutionary features from the sequences of RPs and associated proteins identifying levels of conservation of these features across all evolutionary depths from eukaryote-conserved to Kingdom-conserved (plants, fungi, animals) and within Kingdom-conserved. Integrating data from across the program of research, and combining traditional comparative genomics and phylogenomics with machine learning techniques, we will generate hypotheses of ribosomal specialisation which the rest of the RiboCode team will test from a structural and functional perspective.
