A porous metal-organic framework ‘host’ soaks up molecular ‘guests’ to form a crystalline complex, the structure of which can be determined by X-ray crystallography, providing atomic-resolution structures of minute amounts of guest molecules, and perhaps eventually other nanostructures.
Five proteins were designed from scratch and found to fold into stable proteins as designed, proving the ability to provide ideal, robust building blocks for artificial protein structures.
Tryptophan residues introduced at various positions in a protein chain identify folding intermediates that are too short-lived to be structurally characterized otherwise.
The Foldit approach to protein structure determination and protein design has proved its worth with the solution by citizen scientists in three weeks of an important protein structure that had stumped scientists working on the problem for more than a decade.
Progress in computational modeling of protein structures and in designing protein interfaces that bind in a desired geometrical orientation prepare the way for designing protein components of molecular machine systems.
MIT scientists have devised much more efficient procedures for modeling protein folding in order to be able to model the folding of the flood of proteins sequences made available by modern genome sequencing methods.
A significant fraction of small protein sequences designed only to fold into stable structures can substitute for missing natural proteins.
Is it Worth Starting Now? Surely, you will say, it would have been wonderful if back in 1959 people had taken Feynman seriously and really tried the Feynman path: we’d have the full-fledged paraphernalia of real, live molecular machinery now, with everything ranging from nanofactories to cell-repair machines. After all, it’s been 50 years. The… Continue reading Feynman's Path to Nanotech (part 5)
Dr. David Baker, who with Dr. Brian Kuhlman was awarded the 2004 Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize for Theory, will be one of three winners of the 2008 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics. Dr. Baker has been featured on Nanodot posts this year for inviting online gamers to aid in protein design… Continue reading Nanotechnology researcher to receive Sackler Prize in Biophysics
A major milestone along the protein design path to productive nanosytems and advanced nanotechnology has been achieved—the design by computational methods of enzymes that catalyze reactions for which biological enzymes do not exist.
