What a day! David Baker takes half the Nobel for protein engineering! Extremely well-deserved.

This particular award is close to my heart, because David welcomed me into his lab as an intern in 2011. Back then, I was a less-than-stellar undergraduate student. I didn’t test well, I struggled with homework, and I really much preferred to muse about whatever was on my mind rather than work on my coursework (I guess some things never change). By chance, I managed to gain admission into a fantastic program called EXROP created by HHMI. EXROP would offer me the chance to get paid to do scientific research, and David kindly accepted me into his lab for the summer.

That summer was wonderful. I worked with Eva-Maria Strauch designing protein-protein interfaces, performing directed evolution studies on them using yeast cell surface display, and then we tested the binding mechanisms by mutagenizing sites that would be important to enable protein interaction at the engineering surface. I remember we even found a particular ‘toggle-able’ interface: One of our binders used a histidine residue to bind its target, thus rendering it pH-sensitive.

That was my first real experience with research, and I could not be more grateful that it was in David’s lab.

Congratulations again to the entire Baker lab for this extremely well-deserved Nobel.