Journal post from David Baker

Many common materials such as silk and wool are made out of regular repeating arrays of proteins, and symmetric protein arrays make up the coats of viruses and many other assemblies inside cells. The ability to robustly design self assembling materials made out of proteins would have huge numbers of applications-the naturally occurring assemblies are useful, but imagine if we could make custom materials for 21st century problems. In this weeks Science magazine, we describe the use of Rosetta to design self assembling protein nano structures with very high accuracy. We are now attempting to create many different types of symmetric materials, and you will be seeing more symmetric calculations on your rosetta@home screen server. Thank you for making possible this completely new approach to nanotechnology!