Edward M. Marcotte

Dr. Marcotte is an evolutionary biochemist whose research broadly uses tools of proteomics, bioinformatics, and systems and synthetic biology, with current work focused on the interactions, dynamics, and evolution of proteins across the tree of life. Marcotte has authored >250 journal publications and >29 issued/in process patents, received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, and co-founded the single molecule protein sequencing company Erisyon, Inc. He is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas, where he holds the Mr. and Mrs. Corbin J. Robertson, Sr. Regents Chair in Molecular Biology.

The Marcotte lab studies the regulation and organization of the human proteome, especially the dynamics and control of proteins’ intracellular abundances, physical assembly into complexes, and intracellular localizations. We apply these data to study the mechanisms of human genetic diseases, since proteins in the same physical complex or pathway tend to be implicated in the same traits or diseases. We have used this principle to successfully link many genes to specific traits and diseases, including finding new genes for angiogenesis, deafness, and congenital birth defects. We often adopt a large-scale perspective, studying thousands of proteins at once, and we rely heavily on evolutionary comparisons to identify critical, conserved elements of the systems we study. These strategies present major technical and computational challenges, so we frequently have to invent new technologies and scale-up existing ones to assay protein function, expression, and localization across entire proteomes, including inventing technology for single molecule protein sequencing.