Nobel Prize in Chemistry – 2018: Speeding Up Protein Evolution

Abstract

The 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry rewards research on the use of bacteria and viruses to generate and screen highly diverse protein sequences for improved catalytic and ligandbinding function. One half of the Prize was awarded to Professor Frances Arnold of the California Institute of Technology (California, USA). The other half was awarded jointly to Professor George P Smith of the University of Missouri (Columbia, USA) and Professor Sir Gregory P Winter of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK). The three winners have been amongst the tallest of stalwarts in combinatorial approaches to protein engineering.