"If you want to build an airplane, you don’t start by modifying a bird; instead, you understand the first principles of aerodynamics and build flying machines from those principles. As we get closer to solving the protein folding problem, we can now design completely new proteins from scratch for specific purposes."

"Transmembrane proteins are a challenge because they contain a region that needs to be embedded in the membrane, and this makes their physics complicated. Moreover, working with membrane proteins is challenging because it’s simply harder to make membrane proteins, let alone solve their structures. So they are difficult from both a computational design and structure-determination perspective."

--------- David Baker

Full text link:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/11/26/1819099115.full