Proteins Made To Order

This is actually a fairly important discovery. The poster of the article seems to be completely clueless as to why it is important.

Without going into all of the details, being able to predict the shape of proteins is one of the things needed to make nanotechnology fulfill its potential - to build a nanotech "assembler".

If you want all the details you would have to go back to "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler.

Proteins of the right shape can be used to create complex structures - anything from a virus to a nano-computer. Construct some RNA, feed it into a cell and get back as many copies of the protein chain as you please.

Do this for several different proteins.

Leave all of these proteins in the same chemical soup and they will combine on their own to form the more complex structuresl

But if you can't predict the shape the protein folds into, you can't get started. This has been a key problem in nano-tech going back to the 1970s.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/svOF0w3WaYQ/proteins-made-to-order

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