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Proteins Made To Order
ananyo writes "Proteins are an enormous molecular achievement: chains of amino acids that fold spontaneously into a precise conformation, time after time, optimized by evolution for their particular function. Yet given the exponential number of contortions possible for any chain of amino acids, dictating a sequence that will fold into a predictable structure has been a daunting task. Now researchers report that they can do just that. By following a set of rules described in a paper published in Nature (abstract), a husband and wife team from David Baker's laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle has designed five proteins from scratch that fold reliably into predicted conformations. The work could eventually allow scientists to custom design proteins with specific functions."
FTFA: "The work was spearheaded by husband-and-wife team Nobuyasu Koga and Rie Tatsumi-Koga"
A centuries-old tradition of origami!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Because, unless your're His Noodliness, you have to start out small. We can make DNA of reasonable length but we don't know how to create a sequence that will cause a protein to fold in a specific pattern to it will have a specific function and not act like a disorganized blob of glop.
You want to be the whole spaghetti, not just the stuff tossed out in the sink.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is actually a fairly important discovery. The poster of the article seems to be completely clueless as to why it is important.
Without going into all of the details, being able to predict the shape of proteins is one of the things needed to make nanotechnology fulfill its potential - to build a nanotech "assembler".
If you want all the details you would have to go back to "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler.
Proteins of the right shape can be used to create complex structures - anything from a virus to a nano-computer. Construct some RNA, feed it into a cell and get back as many copies of the protein chain as you please.
Do this for several different proteins.
Leave all of these proteins in the same chemical soup and they will combine on their own to form the more complex structuresl
But if you can't predict the shape the protein folds into, you can't get started. This has been a key problem in nano-tech going back to the 1970s.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
I've always said that protein engineering will become more important to humanity than the transistor, For just one example of the incredible potential proteins have, look at enzymes. These are biological catalysts that tirelessly perform very specific chemical reactions. In the case of some enzymes, they are called 'kinetically perfect', meaning that they are so fast the only way we have of explaining the reaction speed is that every time the molecule they work on collides with the enzyme, the reaction immediately happens. Mind-blowingly, some enzymes are even faster than this, so-called 'better than kinetically perfect' and how they manage their astounding speed is one of biology's great unsolved problems.
Some other cool example of proteins: Proton pumps in your stomach, which carry individual protons into your stomach to make acid. Photosystems 1 and 2 in plant chloroplasts, which juggle electrons between each other and weave sunlight into sugar, forming the basis of the whole earth's food chain.