Study offers a new route to design the 'cellular machines' needed to understand and battle diseases

Proteins are nature's machines. They provide oxygen to power our muscles, catalyze reactions that help us extract energy from food, and fend off infections from bacteria and viruses. For decades, scientists have searched for ways to design new proteins that can serve specific purposes in medicine, research, and industry. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have developed a method that creates novel proteins by stitching together pieces of already existing prot