Proteins without Parents
Using three AI protein prediction tools, a Chinese-Israeli study at the Weizmann Institute of Science uncovered new wrinkles in the folding story of ‘orphan’ proteins. When Weizmann Professors Joel Sussman...
Building Better Enzymes – by Breaking Them Down
In a major step toward greener industry, Weizmann Institute scientists have created a computational method for generating effective enzymes with unprecedented efficiency. This new study is now published in Science,...
Designing Proteins Just Got a Lot Easier
Studies at the Weizmann Institute of science is shows that AI is providing researchers the means to design biomolecules with a huge range of valuable functions – from medicine to...
Cells and the City
Tracing the evolution of protein maintenance in cellular ‘boroughs’, students of the Weizmann Institute’s Professor Dan Tawfik’s have now published their study following his untimely death. When we contemplate the...
A New Approach to Tailoring Cancer Therapy: Tapping into Signalling Activities in Cancer Cells
Choosing the right drug for each cancer patient is key to successful treatment, but currently physicians have few reliable pointers to guide them in designing treatment protocols. Researchers at the...
Which Came First? Amino acids or proteins?
What did the very first proteins that appeared on Earth around 3.7 billion years ago look like? Now an experiment in recreating primordial proteins solves a long-standing riddle. Professor Dan...
Designing Better Proteins
A computational method for designing dramatically more efficient versions of enzymes, being developed at the Weizmann Institute of Research, may lead to new avenues of drug design and new treatments...
“Lord of the Rings” Protein Jump-Starts Nerve Repair
When the body needs to repair nerve injury, the machinery is already in place. Hidden within nerve cells is a ‘one-ring-to-rule-them-all’ kind of trigger: a molecular machine that can ramp...
Spare Parts Might “Jump-Start” Protein Design
The idea of proteins that can be designed on computers for specific functions has been a cutting-edge concept that has stubbornly remained ‘in the future’ however new research at the...
‘Time Machine’ Reveals Protein Evolution
Discovering how proteins originated and developed is the focus of research in the lab of Professor Dan Tawfik of the Weizmann Institute’s Biomolecular Sciences Department, and where, with the help...
New Techniques to ‘See’ Changes in Protein Behaviour
Proteins are the molecular machines that make living things function. Understanding, measuring and visualising their structural changes as they perform biological functions are therefore imperative. However to see such changes,...