Eliel Akinbami

My research focuses on understanding and engineering enzyme function. While the field of protein engineering has made strides in designing small molecule proteins, slower strides are being made to design an enzyme. One requirement for this is: elucidating sequence-structure-function relationship of enzymes. In the Fordyce and Herschlag labs, I take advantage of the HTMEK (High throughput Microfluidic Enzyme Kinetics) platform which offers the ability to assign different aspects of enzyme function to each residue/domain within an enzyme. 

I am studying NPP (Nucleotide Pyrophosphatase/Phosphodiester) which is a member of the AP superfamily, a class of enzymes that is being studied in the Herschlag lab. By studying the AP superfamily enzymes in high throughput, I hope to be able to compare effect of function towards the goal of generating underlying design principles that can lead to engineering enzyme function.