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takyon writes:

The New York Times has published an article about the recent work of Dr. David Baker, a biochemist who launched Rosetta@home in 2005:

Scientists Are Designing Artisanal Proteins for Your Body

[...] Scientists have studied proteins for nearly two centuries, and over that time they've worked out how cells create them from simple building blocks. They have long dreamed of assembling those elements into new proteins not found in nature.

But they've been stumped by one great mystery: how the building blocks in a protein take their final shape. David Baker, 55, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, has been investigating that enigma for a quarter-century.

Now, it looks as if he and his colleagues have cracked it. Thanks in part to crowdsourced computers and smartphones belonging to over a million volunteers, the scientists have figured out how to choose the building blocks required to create a protein that will take on the shape they want.

In a series of papers published this year, Dr. Baker and his colleagues unveiled the results of this work. They have produced thousands of different kinds of proteins, which assume the shape the scientists had predicted. Often those proteins are profoundly different from any found in nature.

This expertise has led to a profound scientific advance: cellular proteins designed by man, not by nature. "We can now build proteins from scratch from first principles to do what we want," said Dr. Baker.

Massively parallel de novo protein design for targeted therapeutics (DOI: 10.1038/nature23912) (DX)

Computational design of environmental sensors for the potent opioid fentanyl (open, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.28909.001) (DX)

Evolution of a designed protein assembly encapsulating its own RNA genome (DOI: 10.1038/nature25157) (DX)

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