Machine Learning-Assisted Directed Evolution with Bruce Wittmann

Top builders in science

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We discuss Bruce's career from being pre-med and getting into research while at Washington University in St. Louis to working at Intrexon and going to grad school at Caltech afterwards. While at Intrexon, he saw the need for better tools to scale biology and decided to go to Caltech to pursue his ideas. At Caltech, he was advised by Prof. Frances Arnold, who pioneered the protein engineering technique "directed evolution" that eventually led to her winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. While a member of the Arnold Lab, Bruce was part of a group bringing machine learning to protein engineering and directed evolution; over the course of 5 years, Bruce did some incredible work in grad school. A key paper was published in Cell around machine learning-assisted directed protein evolution: https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(21)00286-6

You can also read his graduate dissertation here: https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/14631/

Beyond his research and numerous papers, we also discuss the broader field of protein engineering and ML and his perspective on new opportunities in comp bio and protein design. On top of all of this great work, Bruce along with several people from the Arnold Lab maintain one of the best documented GitHub repos in bio: https://github.com/fhalab/MLDE. A favorite quote of mine after speaking with Bruce is around his goal to build tools that "are accessible to as many people as possible."

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And YouTube: