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We're talking about recent research breakthroughs this week on Healthwatch. Proteins are the body's building blocks, and understanding how proteins work is important for understanding life. Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered a set of rules that nature has apparently used to design proteins. The scientists have now used these rules to create artificial proteins in the laboratory.
Dr. Rama Ranganathan, the UT Southwestern pharmacologist who led the research team, says the goal wasn't to create an artificial protein so much as it was to see how the rules researchers discovered really worked.
The scientists plan more study to see how close the artificial proteins are to proteins in living organisms.
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October 2005
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