Henrique Pereira
Biochemist Research Scientist
Research Interests
Pereira’s research focuses on protein X-ray crystallography to understand at the atomic level the function of a diverse range of enzymes related to several Joint BioEnergy Institute projects from Deconstruction, Feedstocks, Biofuels and Bioproducts, and Technology Divisions.
Recent Publications
Related News
Newly Discovered Bacterial Enzyme Produces Useful Biopolymer
Researchers have identified a bacterial enzyme that produces a novel biopolymer which holds promise as a useful biomaterial because of its biodegradability and biocompatibility.
AI-Fueled Software Reveals Accurate Protein Structure Prediction
For structural biologists who study proteins, predicting their shape offers a key to understanding their function and accelerating treatments for diseases like cancer and COVID-19. The current approaches to accurately mapping that shape have their limitations, but by applying powerful machine learning methods to the large library of protein structures it is now possible to predict a protein’s shape from its gene sequence.
Study Finds ‘Missing Link’ in the Evolutionary History of Carbon-Fixing Protein Rubisco
In a study appearing in Nature Plants, researchers from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Berkeley Lab report the discovery and characterization of a previously undescribed lineage of form I rubisco – one that the researchers suspect diverged from form I rubisco prior to the evolution of cyanobacteria. The novel lineage, called form I’ rubisco, gives researchers new insights into the structural evolution of form I rubisco, potentially providing clues as to how this enzyme changed the planet. The work was led by Patrick Shih, a UC Davis assistant professor and the director of Plant Biosystems Design at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and Doug Banda, a postdoctoral scholar in his lab.
