Hard Drugs3 Syys 2025

Proteins: Weird blobs that do important things

This episode kicks off a mini-series on proteins, drug development and AI. Saloni and Jacob explore the world of proteins, including how proteins fold into complex shapes, why that complexity matters and how crowded and dynamic the inside of a cell really is; and they exchange surprising statistics about proteins.

Hard Drugs is a new podcast from Works in Progress and Open Philanthropy about medical innovation presented by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.

You can watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Saloni’s substack newsletter: https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/

Jacob’s blog: https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/

Books:

Ron Milo and Rob Phillips. Biology by the numbers https://book.bionumbers.org/
Carl Ivar Branden and John Tooze (1999) Introduction to protein structure https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9781136969898/introduction-protein-structure-john-tooze-carl-ivar-branden

Articles:

Niko McCarty (2023). Biology is a burrito. https://www.asimov.press/p/burrito-biology
Rhiannon Morris, Katrina Black, and Elliott Stollar (2022) Uncovering protein function: from classification to complexes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9400073/
Victor Muñoz and Michele Cerminara (2016) When fast is better: protein folding fundamentals and mechanisms from ultrafast approaches https://portlandpress.com/biochemj/article/473/17/2545/49248/When-fast-is-better-protein-folding-fundamentals

Image credits:

Chang et al. (2012) Egg white in organic electronics. https://spie.org/news/4149-egg-white-in-organic-electronics [diagram of egg white denaturing and cross-linking]
John Kendrew’s model of myoglobin’s structure; via Carl Ivar Branden and John Tooze (1999) Introduction to protein structure.
Carl Ivar Branden and John Tooze (1999) Introduction to protein structure. [diagram of amino acids and protein structure]
Ron Milo and Rob Phillips. Which is bigger, mRNA or the protein it codes for? https://book.bionumbers.org/which-is-bigger-mrna-or-the-protein-it-codes-for/ [diagram of myoglobin mRNA vs protein]
Scitable (2014). Microtubules and Filaments. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/microtubules-and-filaments-14052932/ [diagram of microtubules]

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