Dmitry Korkin: Evolution of Proteins, Viruses, Life, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #153

The following is a conversation with Dmitry Korkin, his second time on the podcast. He's a professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at WPI, where he specializes in bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. He loves biology, he loves computing, plus he is Russian and recites a poem in Russian at the end of the podcast. What else could you possibly ask for in this world? Quick mention of our sponsors: Brave Browser, NetSuite business management software, Magic Spoon low carb cereal, and Eight Sleep self-cooling mattress. So the choice is browsing privacy, business success, healthy diet, or comfortable sleep. Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that to me, the scientists that did the best apolitical, impactful, brilliant work of 2020 are the biologists who study viruses without an agenda, without much sleep, to be honest, just a pure passion for scientific discovery and exploration of the mysteries within viruses. Viruses are both terrifying and beautiful. Terrifying because they can threaten the fabric of human civilization, both biological and psychological. Beautiful because they give us insights into the nature of life on Earth, and perhaps even extraterrestrial life of the not-so-intelligent variety that might meet us one day as we explore the habitable planets and moons in our universe. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman. And now, here's my conversation with Dmitry Korkin. It's often said that proteins and, uh, the amino acid residues that make them up are the building blocks of life. Do you think of proteins in this way, as the, uh, basic building blocks of life?

Yes and no. So the proteins indeed is the, the basic unit, biological unit, that carries out, uh, important function of the cell. However, through studying the proteins, and comparing the proteins across different species, across dis- different kingdoms, you realize that, uh, proteins are actually a more, a much more complicated, uh, so they have, um, so-called modular complexity. And so, uh, what I mean by that is, um, an average protein consists of, um, of several structural units. So we call them, uh, protein domains. And so you can imagine a protein as a string of beads, where each bead is a protein domain. And, uh, you know, in the past 20 years, scientists have been studying, uh, the nature of the protein domains, 'cause, uh, we realized that it's, it's, it's the unit. Because if you look at the functions, right? So, so, uh, many proteins have more than one function, and those, uh, protein functions, uh, are often carried out by those protein domains. So, um, we also see that, uh, in the evolution, those proteins' domains get shuffled. So, so they act actually as, as a unit. Also from the structural perspective, right? So, you know, y- uh, some people think of, uh, a protein as a sort of a globular, um, molecule, but as a matter of fact, is, is, uh, the globular part of this protein is a protein domain. So we, we often have this, uh, you know, again, the, the, the, uh, collection of these protein domains, um, align, uh, on a string as beads.