MIT Associate Professor Joey Davis studies how ribosomes — the cellular machines that build proteins — are assembled from dozens of proteins and RNA molecules. His research reveals that ribosome assembly is surprisingly flexible and non-linear, unlike a strict sequential process. Davis's lab uses cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and developed CryoDRGN, a neural network-based method to analyze cryo-EM data and reconstruct the full ensemble of structural intermediates. Future work aims to scale cryo-EM throughput to generate large protein structure datasets that could improve AI-based protein structure prediction models.
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