A bit about the Protein Folding work, that the NOBEL PRIZE was awarded to this month

The science of proteins and protein folding has been a huge area of research, for a while. When they were planning experiments for the ISS Space Station in 1990 or so, Protein crystal growth was a way to research this. That was a main method then, to use x-ray scattering to study the structure of the proteins
Now in 2024, these researches seem to have mastered predicting how any protein would “fold” which is significant to how they work biologically. The one thing that has greatly advanced recently, was an AI program called Alpha Fold, Also anther research worked on picking what protein sequence would fold in a certain way, so sort of reverse engineering the predictions to see what could be made, in the lab, to create that folded protein they wanted to create.

How this is very useful can be seen in this statement in the article

“It allows us to better understand how life functions, including why some diseases develop, how antibiotic resistance occurs or why some microbes can decompose plastic,” the Nobel website said.

Making all-new proteins could lead to new nanomaterials, targeted drugs and vaccines, or more climate-friendly chemicals, it added.”

Read more about this in the phys dot org article here

https://phys.org/news/2024-10-proteins-nobel-chemistry.html


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