Protein engineering research reveals the mysteries of life, enabling advances in pharmaceuticals
Proteins are so much more than nutrients in food. Virtually every reaction in the body that makes life possible involves this large group of molecules. And when things go wrong in our health, proteins are usually part of ...
In certain types of heart disease, for instance, the proteins in cardiac tissue, seen with high-resolution microscopy, are visibly disordered. Alex Dunn, professor of chemical engineering, describes proteins like the beams of a house: "We can see that in unhealthy heart muscle cells, all of those beams are out of place."
Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, making the biochemical processes of life possible. These workhorses include enzymes, which bind to other molecules to speed up reactions, and antibodies that attach to viruses and prevent them from infecting cells.
"Proteins move things around the cell. They transmit signals from outside the cell to change levels of gene expression. They catalyze all of the chemical reactions that make life possible," says Polly Fordyce, associate professor of bioengineering and of genetics.
Understanding how proteins do all this can help solve fundamental questions of how proteins organize into greater structures and fine-tune their function for applications in medicine, industry, and other areas. These questions inspire Stanford engineers to study the life-enabling molecules from every angle.
A 3D density map of spike proteins on the surface of an alpha coronavirus was generated from cryogenic electron tomography images and reconstruction. This figure highlights the spike proteins, showing that each spike has a different bending angle relative to the spherical surface of the virion. The flexibility of these spikes has been shown to correlate with other data on viral infectivity. Detailed images like this one give clearer insights into protein folding, virus assembly and disassembly, and pathogen-host interactions. Credit: Chiu Lab
Eliel Akinbami, Albert Lee, and Polly Fordyce use the pneumatic manifold pictured here to operate devices for high-throughput microfluidic enzyme kinetics, or HT-MEK, which allows them to quickly quantify kinetics for up to 1,500 enzyme variants at once. Credit: Stanford University
Elizabeth Sattely and her lab do research to reveal how plants use their chemistry to grow into the largest and longest-living organisms on Earth. Ultimately, they’d like to be able to use this knowledge of plant pathways to engineer plant proteins and metabolites in a way that will make agriculture more sustainable and prevent human diseases caused by diet. Credit: Stanford University