The relationship between protein sequence and structure isn’t as much of a mystery as it once was. In late 2020, researchers from DeepMind in London turned heads with their AlphaFold2 model, which uses artificial intelligence to predict the structures of natural proteins with stunning accuracy. (See Physics Today, October 2021, page 14.) But there’s more to know about a protein than its structure. Proteins aren’t static isolated objects—they’re constantly interacting with other molecules around them. The energetics and dynamics of those interactions are fundamental to proteins’ role as the building blocks of life.
Now researchers led by William DeGrado (University of California, San Francisco), his former postdoc Nicholas Polizzi (now on the faculty at Harvard University), and his current postdoc Lei Lu have unveiled a way to design proteins from scratch so that the proteins not only bind to a specified target molecule but do so with predictable...
