César Ramírez Sarmiento

But if you have like a piece that is long enough, then you can fold it.

So proteins also fold upon themselves.

And so they're making these very, very tiny proteins that actually fold upon themselves so they have shape.

And that shape is complementary to different target cells that have proteins that are involved in cellular processes that are related to different diseases that can go from like

different allergic reactions to even like treatments for cancer so the idea is to develop like this very very tiny proteins that you can use as a pharmaceutical as a drug and that would be a better solution that developing different chemical compounds that do not offer the same capabilities that these proteins have so i'm really looking forward to see what they do with it

Yeah, that's an interesting question.

So I think that I'm seeing a lot of advances right now in making new enzymes.

So enzymes are very difficult to make.

They have very specific sites on the protein surface.

So if you imagine that you have like a sphere as a protein, then they have like a little hole on the surface that is called the active site.

And the chemical reaction actually happens in that site and that site alone, which means that there has to be

very specific amino acids from your protein in very specific positions.

So the methods that we had like a year ago were like pretty bad at the enzyme design.

And so before we will take an enzyme that we know it has some activity for some thing that we wanted to do.

Like there's a lot of enzymes that do plastic degradation, so we will improve the sequence, but we will never change the structure.

But nowadays there's a lot of methods that actually can afford that.

And so the idea is that you can create new structures that have never seen before in nature of enzymes, of new enzymes.

And that allows for thinking about new chemical reactions that we can create from scratch.

So that's very exciting.

And I think that the field is moving forward very fast towards developing these new enzymes for new chemical reactions.