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Researchers have learned to create custom versions of cellular proteins
- melling 9y agoHas it been solved as predicted? “Now, it looks as if he and his colleagues have cracked it. Thanks in part to crowdsourced computers and smartphones belonging to over a million volunteers, the scientists have figured out how to choose the building blocks required to create a protein that will take on the shape they want.”
- dang 9y agoWe changed the submission title above from "The Protein folding problem is now solved, one of Kurzweil's predictions", which was editorialized. Since the article's own title is rather linkbaity, which also breaks the site guidelines, we changed it to representative language from the article text.
- SCAQTony 9y agoI wonder if this breakthrough could help build foodstuffs like breast milk for infants or less expensive high quality meat?
- toufka 9y agoYep. And silks, and leathers, and therapetics, and biosensors. See: Muufri, Bolt Threads, Modern Meadow, Cell Design Labs, Logic Ink, etc.
- sinab 9y agoThe results on the influenza trials are incredible, I really like the idea of distributed computing in helping tackle these types of challenges. If anyone is interested in learning more about the Rosetta project, here is a link https://boinc.bakerlab.org/ https://boinc.bakerlab.org/
- Sniffnoy 9y agoNon-mobile link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/science/protein-design-david-baker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/science/protein-design-da...
- dang 9y agoThanks, missed that one.
- Sniffnoy 9y agoIsn't protein folding NP-hard? How are they getting around that problem?
- adrianN 9y agoSomething being NP-hard doesn't preclude algorithms that solve or sufficiently approximate solutions for instances that occur in practice. SAT is also NP-hard, but you can download solvers that can handle most huge instances you need solved just fine.
- Sniffnoy 9y agoWhich is the sort of thing the article ought to talk about!
- russdill 9y agohttps://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-45154-4_10 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-45154-4_10 Monte-Carlo Sampling for NP-Hard Maximization Problems in the Framework of Weighted Parsing
- Sniffnoy 9y agoThe question isn't "How can you do possibly well on NP-hard problems?" It's, what particular tricks are these people using that allow them to get around the NP-hardness of this particular problem? The article doesn't talk about that and it should.
- srikar 9y agoWish HN had promoted my submission instead. I submitted the story earlier in the week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16008608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16008608
- stefanpie 9y agoIs there a direct statement of explanation or at a section staying exactly how they solved the problem or what their approach was. I understand they have done years of research and have multiple papers, but isnt it reasonable that the article at least provide some explanation or discussion of their methods.
- jfarlow 9y agoThe ability to intelligently design these atomically-precise nanomachines will be an ever-increasing part of our technological development. These proteins are small enough to fit into the features of a modern processor, with a physical resolution less than a nanometer - wet, warm, and 3D. And nature has already given us a library of what these technologies can do - and now we're even expanding those capabilities for our own purposes. Building new biological sensors, products, and therapies - rewiring and inventing biological I/O are now within reach. If you want to build novel proteins from the other direction - based on linking emeperically validated biological functions rather than trying to calculate function from biochemical principles, check out our system at Serotiny [1]. We're taking a bit of a different approach to protein design - build new proteins by reusing biological components with known functions. And though we help design proteins with new functions, these guys design particular enzymatic pockets or predict particular structures - that's amazing. The Baker lab and all of their colleagues have put so much effort into this goal - I'm eager to see what comes next. [1] https://serotiny.bio/notes/pinecone/ https://serotiny.bio/notes/pinecone/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 9y agoi wonder if it's related to the work on spiroligomer by Christian Schafmeister (also crafting proteins)
- 0xBA5ED 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LetJMbu7uY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LetJMbu7uY Here's a cool video which gives an overview of the problem and some solution approaches for anyone interested in the general topic.
- hacker_9 9y agoIs the Rosetta project not open source? Would be interesting to see how the protein folding simulation is done.