John wisely traded the sunny skies of Northern California for the “motivating” weather of the Boston area to study what he realized he was interested in his last year as an undergraduate: evolution. At the University of California, Berkeley, he performed research in the fields of enzymology and computational biology with the broad goal of understanding the structural determinants of enzyme function and how the evolution of these regions confers novel activity. Now, as an MCO graduate student in the MCB Department, John seeks to combine biochemical and structural lines of investigation with genetics and developmental biology to study the molecular and evolutionary processes that underlie germ cell formation in divergent organisms. He is a joint PhD candidate with Prof. Andres Leschziner in the MCB Department.

John is a graduate student in the MCO Graduate Training Program.

Publications

Srouji, J. R. and Extavour, C. Redefining stem cells and assembling germ plasm: key transitions in the evolution of the germ line. In Key Innovations in Animal Evolution, ed. R. DeSalle and B. Schierwater. Science Publishers (2010) (in press)

Convergent evolution of novel protein function in shrew and lizard venom. Aminetzach, Y.T., Srouji, J.R., Kong, C.Y., and Hoekstra H.E. Current Biology. 19:1925-1931 (2009)

Recombinant expression of twelve evolutionarily diverse subfamily Ialpha aminotransferases. Muratore, K.E., Srouji, J.R., Chow, M.A., and Kirsch J.F. Protein Expression and Purification 57: 34-44 (2008)