Trichomonad lactate and malate dehydrogenase evolution
2011-2014 »The major portion of my doctoral dissertation. Mainly, I was trying to work out how related proteins with two distinct functions evolved said functions. It involved many things (naturally), including statistical ancestral sequence reconstruction, protein crystallography, and enzymology.
Pictured is a figure from the resulting paper, illustrating a change in positions of atoms between a reconstructed ancestral protein (top) and a modern day protein with a difference function (bottom)