Ph.D. Thesis project

www.ttdown.com said:

If you would start yor higher education all over and had to choose a theme for a Ph.D. thesis
project on molecular evolution, what would you choose?

Protobiotic chemical evolution. [Hey, you asked.]
--
John Wilkins wilkins.id.au For long you live and high you fly, and smiles you'll give and tears
you'll cry and all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be

Quoted message said:

If you would start your higher education all over and had to choose a theme for a Ph.D. thesis
project on molecular evolution, what would you choose?

It depends on your area:
- BioChem/Theory: Kinetic specificity enhancement (proofreading) - can it be retrofitted into an
existing biochemical mechanism? Does an unchanneled metabolic pathway proofread? Presumably a
fully channeled pathway does not. Is this a partial explanation of why some organisms channel and
others do not?
- Microbiology: The "kinetosome" and flagella. Is Margulis right? (again!?) (This is a high risk
project. She is probably wrong. But, if not ...)
- P-chem/Biophysics: Eukariote lipids and/or Prokariote cell walls. There is stuff happening there
that we just don't understand yet. And it may be significant for OOL. And the traditional wet
biochemists don't have the tools (yet) for studying it.

Or, since my area is computer science and you asked what I would choose - it would have to be in
coming up with a computationally efficient way to do maximum-likelyhood analysis of sequence data
for taxonomy in a way that takes into account alignment, mutation pressure, rate differences between
taxons, etc.