Computational protein design promises to revolutionize protein engineering

Natural evolution has produced an astounding array of proteins that perform the physical and chemical functions required for life on Earth. Although proteins can be reengineered to provide altered or novel functions, the utility of this approach is limited by the difficulty of identifying protein sequences that display the desired properties. Recently, advances in the field of computational protein design (CPD) have shown that molecular simulation can help to predict sequences with new and improved functions. In the past few years, CPD has been used to design protein variants with optimized specificity of binding to DNA, small molecules, peptides, and other proteins. Initial successes in enzyme design highlight CPD's unique ability to design function de novo. The use of CPD for the engineering of potential therapeutic agents has demonstrated its strength in real-life applications.