Ajasja Ljubetič

During his postdoc in the Baker Lab, dr. Ljubetič designed and developed a de novo random walker, that uses coiled coils as feet. Now he is exploring future applications of this random walker scaffold to build useful molecular protein robots. This is done by combining the power of the Rosetta software suite with cutting-edge deep learning tools (including AlphaFold2, RFdiffusion, and ProteinMPNN) to engineer novel proteins with high precision. This hybrid approach allow binding specificity and modularity of coiled coils, alongside the structural diversity and robustness of de novo protein scaffolds.

The vision of Ajasja group is to design and study dynamic protein assemblies from scratch, with a strong focus on coiled-coil structures.

To make these advanced design strategies accessible, his lab developed and released Prosculpt (https://github.com/ajasja/prosculpt), an open-source library for next-generation protein design."