#proteins

What do the feeling of an ice cube against your skin and the cool minty blast of toothpaste have in common? Both activate our body’s cold-sensing nerves. But until now, scientists hadn’t pinned down exactly how that happened at the level of individual proteins in our cells. David Julius, a structural biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of a protein called TRPV1 that lets us feel the heat of chili peppers. Now, in a recent study published in Nature, he and his colleagues have taken a close look at a protein that let us feel the cool of menthol. Understanding this cold-sensing protein could one day lead to better therapies for cold hypersensitivity that often troubles people undergoing certain types of cancer chemotherapies. But the protein has been way trickier to handle than its heat-sensing cousin.

yeah sure why not?

letter sequence in this ask matching protein-coding amino acids:

Wawawawawawawawawa

protein guy analysis:

in general, the very short ones do tend to work out better because there isn't much structure to model, so there are only so many places each atom could reasonably be. this is a shining example of that idea, and probably the highest confidence structure i've gotten (or at least close to it!) it's small enough that it's a bit hard to really evaluate how accurate things are, but this little peptide looks pretty happy :) the pLDDT colour scale should be in my pinned post, but they range from orange to blue, and this is easily one of the blue-est ones i've ever seen for this blog

predicted protein structure:

Spider silk-inspired process turns corn protein into tougher plastic-like material

When it comes to technology and innovation, we have a lot to thank Mother Nature for. Learning from the natural world has led to a range of useful products, including Velcro, self-cleaning paint, and ultra-strong body armor. And now, a study published in the journal Nature Communications reports that scientists have developed a way to turn a corn protein into a plastic-like material using a method inspired by spider silk. The breakthrough could one day lead to biodegradable food packaging wraps to help reduce environmental waste.

Protein sequencing