Researchers Create Designer ‘Barrel’ Proteins

October 24, 2014

(Phys.org) – Despite the wide variety of tasks that natural proteins perform, they appear to use only a limited number of structural types, perhaps just a few thousand or so. These are used over and over again, being altered and embellished through evolution to generate many different functions. This raises the question: are more protein structures possible than those used and presented to us by nature? A team from Bristol’s School of Chemistry and School of Biochemistry, headed by Professor Dek Woolfson, have addressed this by designing manmade protein molecules from scratch.