Taking the long way to solving the structure of a DNA-mutating enzyme: an adventure in the 4th dimension

I will present three recent publications from my lab on the discovery of mechanisms and structure of the DNA mutating enzyme activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID). I will discuss how our studies of AID orthologs not only provided key insights on the inner workings of human AID leading to our discovery of its structure, but also revealed novel aspects of its function in developmental biology and its evolution.