Latest posts
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How synthetic biology could treat celiac disease
Dr. Ingrid Pultz, an IPD Translational Investigator and Chief Scientific Officer at PvP Biologics, has written a special report for the American Council on Science and Health about how protein design is being used to help fight celiac disease. Pultz describes how an international competition, a video game, and venture…
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Rolling out new jellies
The basic parts of proteins — helices, strands and loops — can be combined in countless ways. But certain combinations are trickier than others. This week scientists from the IPD, along with collaborators in Brno and Santa Cruz, published the first-ever example of designed non-local beta-strand interactions. Beta-sheet proteins carry…
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Fluorescent proteins designed from scratch
In the summer of 1961, Osamu Shimomura drove across the country in a cramped station wagon to scoop jellyfish from the docks of Friday Harbor. He wanted to discover what made them glow. It took Shimomura and other biochemists more 30 years to find a full answer. By then, recombinant…
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2018 IPD Newsletter from David Baker
It was a great year for the Institute for Protein Design and we couldn’t have done all of our amazing work without the support from our donors and contributors! Thank you to everyone who helped us, whether through a donation, collaboration, playing Foldit, or otherwise. We’ve filled the IPD Newsletter…
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Open Philanthropy awards $11.3 million to the Institute for Protein Design
The funds will support our technological revolution in protein design and enable the development of a universal flu vaccine. The $11.3 gift is one of the largest made to date by the San Francisco-based philanthropy in support of science. It is also the first to go to UW Medicine. The…
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SCI-STEM Symposium 2018
Update 2018-07-26: The 2018 SCI-STEM Symposium was recently featured in an eLife article. The Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington held its first ever symposium aimed at providing strategies to address diversity challenges in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The Strategies for Cultivating Inclusion in STEM…
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De Novo Design of Membrane Proteins
It is now possible to create complex, custom-designed transmembrane proteins from scratch ! Today Baker lab members published in Science “Accurate computational design of multipass transmembrane proteins” The Abstract reads as follows: The computational design of transmembrane proteins with more than one membrane-spanning region remains a major challenge. We report…
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David Baker profiled in The New York Times
At the end of a historic year for protein design, the Baker Lab was honored to be profiled in the New York Times by science writer Carl Zimmer. He writes about the technology, progress, and promise in the field, including the contributions from our wonderful crowdsource participants. Graphic: John Hersey /…
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A New World of Designed Macrocycles
Today marks another major step forward for peptide based drug discovery. IPD researchers report in Science the computational design of a new world of small cyclic peptides, “Macrocycles”, increasing the number of the known kinds of these molecules by multiple fold. The conceptual art image below “Illuminating the energy landscape” shows…
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Synthetic Nucleocapsids Have Arrived
Published today in Nature, IPD researchers describe the first synthetic protein assemblies — dubbed synthetic nucleocapsids — that encapsulate their own genome and evolve in complex environments. Synthetic nucleocapsids are built to resemble viral capsids and could be used in future to deliver therapeutics to specific cells and tissues. These icosahedral protein…