Journal post from David Baker

With your help, we have made an exciting breakthrough in protein design that is reported in a research article titled "Principles for designing ideal protein structures" in the journal Nature today. You can read about it at



http://www.nature.com/news/proteins-made-to-order-1.11767



In this paper, we describe general principles for creating new proteins from scratch. The new Institute for Protein Design is using these principles to design new proteins to treat disease.



Rosetta@home was absolutely critical to this work as described in the news article; Figure 3 in the paper shows how all of your contributions were used to test designed sequences to see if they folded up to the right structure. Most of the work units we are sending out on Rosetta@home these days are for exactly these kind of tests on the new proteins we are designing--this is absolutely critical to the research and to the development of new therapeutic and other functions. Thank you again for all of your contributions!