"Engineering structures on the smallest possible scales — using molecules and individual atoms as building blocks — is both physically and conceptually challenging."
“We wanted to achieve a specific geometric pattern of the atoms that these proteins are composed of on the surface of the nanotube,” Grigoryan said. “If you know the underlying atomic lattice, it means that you know how to further build around it, how to attach things to it. It's like scaffolding for future building.”
The hurdle in making such scaffolds isn’t a lack of information, but a surfeit of it: researchers have compiled databases that list hundreds of thousands of actual and potential protein structures in atomic detail. Picking the building materials for a particular structure from this vast array and assuring that they self-assemble into the desired shape was beyond the abilities of powerful computers, much less humans. [Read more]
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