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David Baker: 5 challenges we could solve by designing new proteins

I'm going to tell you about the most amazing machines in the world and what we can now do with them.

Proteins,some of which you see inside a cell here, carry out essentially all the important functions in our bodies.

Proteins digest your food,contract your muscles,fire your neurons and power your immune system.

Everything that happens in biology -- almost -- happens because of proteins.

Proteins are linear chains of building blocks called amino acids.

Nature uses an alphabet of 20 amino acids, some of which have names you may have heard of.

In this picture,for scale,each bump is an atom.

Chemical forces between the amino acids cause these long stringy molecules to fold up into unique,three-dimensional structures.

The folding process,while it looks random,is in fact very precise.

Each protein folds to its characteristic shape each time, and the folding process takes just a fraction of a second.

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