Department of Chemistry

Cooperation between organisms is a major driving force of biological organization at all levels, from single cells to whole ecosystems. Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and other social traits therefore is a central goal of evolutionary theory. I will talk about my recent work that aims to advance the frontiers of social evolution theory in two directions.

New regulatory roles continue to emerge for both natural and engineered RNAs, many of which have specific structures essential to their function. This highlights a growing need to develop technologies that enable rapid and accurate characterization of structural features within complex RNA populations. Yet, available techniques that are reliable are also vastly limited by technological constraints, while the accuracy of popular computational methods is generally poor. These limitations thus pose a major barrier to comprehensive determination of structure from sequence.