Dr. Deepesh Nagarajan Article Accepted in ​“Nature”

Dr. Deepesh Nagarajan (Department of Biotechnology, RUAS) was part of a large international team lead by Tim Huddy (Baker Lab, University of Washington) that computationally designed ​‘ideal’ proteins . These proteins were designed to be assembled into any conceivable shape.

While we typically construct our houses using brick and concrete, Americans prefer to construct their houses out of wood. A wooden house can be made to take any shape through the proper extension and arrangement of its wooden beams. Likewise, the researchers were able to design proteins that adopted triangular, square, circular, and even 3‑dimensional, polyhedral ​‘cage’ shapes using simple protein building blocks that were appropriately extended and linked. The researchers hope that any proteins possessing any conceivable shape can now be designed using their architectural approach.