The Chart Room · geek-culture

Filed by Dana Graviton

In a lab that feels like a backstage pass to biology's engine room, researchers used AI design tools to strip two natural proteases down to their catalytic cores and rebuild the rest, creating enzymes that can be tuned to cut specific proteins—including ones tied to neurological disease. The best versions accelerate the breaking of bonds stable for centuries by a factor of a billion, though they remain less active than their natural models. Evolution, it seems, has been short-circuited.