Discovering Protein Structures
June 2, 2015 | Terry Sharrer
How many proteins make up the human body? The answer is “predicted,” “thought to be,” “estimated at” (and so on) to be between 50,000, 10 million, and a gazillion—but whatever the number only a handful have had their accurate structure identified. According to this piece, it takes two weeks to analyze a data set of 200,000 images to resolve a protein’s 3-D structure. But this effort may become easier with a technique from the University of Toronto that freezes purified proteins of one molecule thickness on a plate for making transmission electron images, which then are interrogated with a pair of novel algorithms. Supposedly this results in a 100,000 fold increase in determining 3-D structures. MORE