César Ramírez Sarmiento

We just don't have a thousand years to wait for it.

We have to do it now.

Protein engineering, in short, it's asking yourself if you can change the amino acid composition of your protein, and by doing so, if you can get improvements in some properties of that protein.

We can use different tools for that.

We can use experimental approaches.

We can use computational approaches.

But overall, what they're doing is that they are changing this sequence of amino acids that compose proteins in order to improve these properties.

This is like giving nature a little push.

And that's where the use of artificial intelligence comes in.

In the last five years, we have seen breakthroughs in artificial intelligence for designing proteins that we never imagined.

They allow us for designing new protein structures, new protein shapes that encode bespoke functions for solving all types of problems.

Before the advent of AI, the success rate for protein design was about 1% or less, which means if you created 100 proteins with 100 different sequences, maybe one of them would work.

Now with the advent of AI, we see about 10 to 20%.

So if you now take your 100 sequences that you generated in the computer, about 20 of them will actually have the desired activity.

And some of them will be actually better than the input sequences of the protein of interest that you're working with.

When I was a kid, I was interested in arts because it was allowing for a space for creativity.

But then when I was in high school, I opted for science because I saw that I could provide much more for the benefit of society by pursuing science instead of arts, in my case.

But I think both disciplines are actually playgrounds for creativity.

For science, artificial intelligence is another tool for coming with creative solutions for different problems.

My dream future for protein engineering is that we have a strong community of protein engineers and designers in Latin America so that we can create solutions for problems that are specific to our countries.