David Baker

And so there are many problems we face today.

And this is sort of a general theme.

In places where nature was already trying to optimize heavily to solve a certain problem, there's not really a need for us to design new proteins.

But in areas where either because we live longer, so things like neurodegeneration are more of a problem.

or because we're putting new things in the environment like plastic or PFAS compounds.

Those are the places where there's a huge opportunity for protein design because we already know from nature that proteins can solve almost any problem.

And so for protein design, it's the problems that nature didn't have to deal with because humans didn't, people didn't live as long or because they hadn't polluted or heated up the planet, for example.

Yeah.

Well, one area that's related to sustainability is that that's also become more pressing since 2019 is trying to design to make crop plants more thermo-tolerant because, you know, temperatures are rising and it's very important that major crops like rice be able to grow and thrive at higher temperatures.

And so one of the things that we've

become very good at with protein design is to make proteins more stable.

So we're excited now about applying those methods to problems like making plants thrive at higher temperatures.

In other areas in technology, we're very excited about sensing and sort of intrigued by the ability of a human or a dog to smell and distinguish between many, many different compounds.

So the way that a dog does that is with protein receptors in its nose that can respond differentially to different compounds that are in the environment.

And we're now designing synthetic proteins that can respond to many, many different molecules.

And so we're very excited about building things like an artificial nose towards that end.

for more general technology applications we're learning how to interface proteins with electronics because then you can have a more direct coupling of a readout from a design protein to something that we can quickly read out on a cell phone for example and one example of that is our we're designing proteins to sense compounds in the environment that

would be embedded directly in silicon nitride chips.

And that's, again, a problem that nature never had to deal with because proteins in nature were never interfacing with electronic devices.

And we've made quite a bit of progress there.