Most life on Earth is based on polymers of 20 amino acids that have evolved into hundreds of thousands of different, highly specialized proteins.
Most life on Earth is based on polymers of 20 amino acids that have evolved into hundreds of thousands of different, highly specialized proteins. They catalyze reactions, form backbone and muscle and even generate movement.
But is all that variety necessary? Could biology work just as well with fewer building blocks and simpler polymers?
Ting Xu, a University of California, Berkeley, polymer scientist, thinks so. She has developed a way to mimic specific functions of natural proteins using only two, four or six different building blocks — ones currently used in plastics — and found that these alternative polymers work as well as the real protein and are a lot easier to synthesize than trying to replicate nature’s design.
As a proof of concept, she used her design method, which is based on machine learning or artificial intelligence, to synthesize polymers that mimic blood plasma. The artificial biological fluid kept natural protein biomarkers intact without refrigeration and even made the natural proteins more resistant to high temperatures — an improvement over real blood plasma.
Read more at University of California, Berkeley
Image: Biological fluids are made up of hundreds or thousands of different proteins (represented by space filling models above) that evolved to work together efficiently but flexibly. UC Berkeley polymer scientists are trying to create artificial fluids composed of random heteropolymers (threads inside spheres) with much less complexity, but which mimic many of the properties of the natural proteins (right), such as stabilizing fragile molecular markers. Image credit: Zhiyuan Ruan, Ting Xu lab
