(1997 DeGrado) Commentary: “A banner year for de novo protein design”

DeGrado sketches the history of protein engineering, describing its origins, achievements, and some open questions. He focuses on a paper by Dahiyat and Mayo which demonstrated fully-automated design of a stable, novel protein. He concludes that “the rules of protein folding and computational methods for de novo design may now be sufficiently defined to allow the engineering of a variety of proteins.”