Back to the Russell House Tavern and it's charming underground dining area. This month Akwasi, Tadasu, Assaf, Andrew were joined by Sergey Ovchinnikov, another John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow. Sergey's laboratory is interested in developing an improved and unified statistical model of protein evolution. He works with metagenomic data collected from soil and water samples around the world to mine DNA sequences to discover new protein families, functions, and protein-protein interactions. Sergey is also very interseted in probing the evolution of multicellularity which became a key talking point during the lunch. We discussed how looking for new proteins from metagenomic data and testing the function of these proteins in cells could lead to insight into both evolution as well as finding unique variations of exisiting similar proteins i.e. new DNA cutting enzymes with different specificities.