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Researchers design proteins from scratch with predictable structures to enable building blocks for nanoscale assembly
From
Nature – 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 today1, a 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. In a blind test, the team showed that the synthesized proteins closely match the predicted structures.
“There’s really only one previous example of a protein that has been designed from scratch: that’s Top7 which we designed 10 years ago,” said Baker, a computational structural biologist. “Top7 was sort of a one-off case,” he says. In the new work, the team presents a generalized approach.
“What you have now is a flexible set of building blocks for nanoscale assembly,” says Jeremy England, a molecular biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who was not involved in the work.
In 1981, Eric Drexler wrote of the protein pathway to molecular manufacturing.
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2012-11-09 01:23:18 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/11/researchers-design-proteins-from.html
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