Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

Stu Borman wrote a nice piece in Chemical & Engineering News (CEN) highlighting a recent paper in Nature Chemistry that presents the work of a collaboration between the Tezcan Lab at UCSD and the Rosetta Design Group. In this work, a monomeric protein was redesigned to become capable of forming metal and pH tunable nano- to micro- scale sheets, tubes, and other assemblies.

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics. Proteins.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Macromolecular systems engineering can help us meet some of the most important technological challenges in the world today, ranging from medicine to renewable energy, and the development of better-integrated computational design tools will accelerate progress. Macromolecular modeling capabilities are advancing rapidly, but much of their potential for supporting systems engineering has yet to be exploited. In this post, I’d like to describe the fundamental nature of the problems and outline some of what needs to be done to make their potential a reality. By Dr. Eric Drexler.

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