Biochemists from the University of Washington have engineered complex protein molecules with additional chemical bonds that make it possible to mix and match them like the base pairs of DNA.
The designer proteins, described today in a paper published by the journal Science, could open the way for a kind of synthetic coding system modeled after the groundbreaking double-helix DNA code system discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick back in 1953.
“Think of it this way: The principle of heredity is Watson-Crick base pairing between the two complementary strands of DNA. We invent in the paper an analogous pairing arrangement for proteins,” David Baker, director of the UW’s Institute for Protein Design, told GeekWire in an email.
