Synaptotagmin-like 4 (Slp-4) is a protein involved in insulin vesicle exocytosis, the process by which insulin leaves the pancreas and enters the bloodstream. In this project, I specifically evaluated how well preserved the membrane-binding C2A and C2B domains of Slp-4 are across evolution, which provides insight into which parts of the protein are most important.
As the computational lead on this project, I programmed an automated bioinformatics pipeline in Python to evaluate the evolutionary conservation of Slp-4, significantly automating our lab’s workflow. We are also preparing a manuscript on this project, for which I am the first author on.
