Francisco Rosciani is an EVOLVE PhD Candidate at the University of Groningen. He obtained a graduate degree on Biological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in his native Argentina. There he also worked on the development of alternative electrochemical methods for biocatalytic activation of DyP-type peroxidases during his specialization on Molecular Biology. Afterwards, he joined the EVOLVE Fellowship as a member of Prof. Dr. Marco Fraaije’s group at Groningen’s Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute.
For his PhD project, Francisco studies the evolution of flavoenzymes through a combination of bioinformatic and experimental approaches. One of the main available tools is Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction, a computational method which allows inferring a biomolecule’s ancestral state. These ancestral states can then be synthetically resurrected in the lab and their phenotype experimentally characterized, effectively providing access to evolutionary information contained in them. By integrating computational methods with experimental validation, the team aims to uncover the underlying principles governing enzyme evolution and cofactor-protein interaction. Ultimately, the work seeks to bridge the gap between natural enzyme evolution and the rational design of novel biocatalysts.
