Designer 'barrel' proteins created

Leah Brandstein

Published: October 23rd, 2014

Source: Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141023142310.htm

Summary: This article talks about proteins. Specifically, it discusses the possibility that more protein structures are possible than the ones humans know currently exist in nature. This idea was formulated due to the rather low number of structural types of proteins used by cells, only about a few thousand. A team of scientists from the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry and School of Biochemistry, led by Professor Dek Woolfson, tested the possibility of there being more protein structures then those found in nature by making their own protein molecules. These scientists made their proteins from scratch, but followed the designing concepts which were obtained from natural proteins. However, the scientists created their proteins with new shapes never seen in the natural world. These man-made proteins contained channels running through them and could be useful in making new functions for proteins. For example, these new proteins could help create protein catalysts which break down fats, or they could help permit new communications between cells.

Connections: This article relates to what we have learned this year in biology class in many ways. In chapter five we learned about proteins which are the focus of this article. We also learned about catalysts which are mentioned briefly when talking about how the new proteins can help to design new protein functions like catalysts that help break down fats. Furthermore, this article strongly relates to the hypothesis-based science we learned about in chapter two. In the article, the scientists observed that there are very few protein structures in nature; they then questioned if it were possible that there are more protein structures then those found in nature; they predicted that they would be able to make protein structures that do not exist in nature, and they tested this by creating said structures. This included nearly all the steps of the idealized scientific method discussed in chapter two, including observations, a question, a prediction, and a test, while lacking a clear hypothesis. However, we also learned that this is just a basic guide for scientific procedure and that this procedure is subject to variation in structure which may account for the lack of an explicit hypothesis in the article.