The remarkable properties of natural proteins have been up to 3 billion years in the making via a continuous process of structural experimentation and selection. This process was initiated before living organisms came into being and continued thereafter in the context of all the various life forms on the planet. In comparison, the capabilities of simple organic molecules are particularly primitive and limited. As such, a protein is like a pre-programmed molecular computer, taking environmental and molecular inputs and converting them to a specific chemical output at a point in time. Even though proteins can be very large molecules, every fragment of the structure makes a contribution to the final functional expression by way of a complicated and multidimensional network of intramolecular relationships and mutual influences.
Proteins are still a major research challenge.
Similarly, although so much is known about protein 3D structure, it cannot yet be reliably predicted from the amino acid sequence alone. And there are a huge number of sequences, most deduced from the sequencing of genes, for which there is no 3D structure, no functional data, and no immediate prospect of direct chemical investigation. Engineering of proteins, though feasible, is still in its infancy because it requires an intimate understanding of their structures and mechanisms for it to truly match Nature's past successes. Ultimately, there can be no substitute for discovering how a protein actually works before attempting to derive something new from it. My research into proteins is guided by the belief that the breakthrough will come from understanding exactly how protein structure and mechanism has evolved.