Ronald Koder is an associate professor of physics at the City College of New York and he and his team are working on a new way to detect deadly nerve agents.
A neurotoxin and a deadly chemical warfare agent, VX has been used in assassinations by some countries. Permanent brain damage can be caused by exposure.
These potentially life-saving findings are published in the July 2022, edition of Science Advances, with the primary author being a lab member. The design of the two proteins that detect the neurotoxin was outlined.
The CCNY team used a design program called ProtCAD to create 20 different proteins. The computer code was new and unlike anything the team had previously worked with, so it came as a bit of a surprise that two of their designs worked quickly.
The first thing Koder tried was a small molecule. The negative charges repel each other and then theProtein unfolds. It's like a stick. The molecule becomes much more compact when theProteinbinds it
False positives from chemicals can be produced from previous detectors. The entire surface of the molecule can be scanned down to one hundred millionth of a centimeters.
Koder said that they got this remarkable specificity because they were making contact with the whole molecule.
The technology used to detect the presence of small molecule called biomarkers is rapidly evolving.
More information: James J. McCann et al, Computational design of a sensitive, selective phase-changing sensor protein for the VX nerve agent, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh3421 Journal information: Science Advances
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