Thank you, Rebecca! Super excited about it indeed!

I am so grateful to my PhD advisor @levine-lab.bsky.social for her support and mentoring, Hannah Futeran for her huge contribution to the project, and our awesome collaborators @asantiagofrangos.bsky.social and Briana Cruga for their expertise in structural biology and significant contribution!

We finally suggested that compensatory evolution within the complex is triggered by the selfish telomeric retrotransposons.

We further performed structural predictions and found lineage-specific intermolecular contacts that involve a pair of residues that both evolve specifically along the same lineage. This pair of residues also include one of the 6 focal residues.

We also showed that such compensatory evolution is not only important for maintaining end protection through development but also crucial for establishing end protection in the early embryo.

We showed how a protein evolved to keep up with its binding partner within the essential Drosophila telomere protection complex. We demonstrated that compensatory evolution of at most 6 residues on the protein-protein interaction surface is necessary and sufficient for end protection.

Thank you for sharing, Peter!