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Asked by ellerayn to Susana, Sam, Dave, Ben on 19 Jun 2013.
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Sam Horrell answered on 19 Jun 2013:
Proteins do pretty much eveything in our bodies, what ever process is happening in your body or in bacteria or any other organism it’ll be a protein that makes sure everything is running smoothly. This is evident when you look at diseases where a single protein going wrong, either by there being too much or too little, causing some devastating effects in our body. If we can understand the proteins we can understand why things go wrong in our bodies and hopefully how we can fix them.
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Benjamin Hall answered on 19 Jun 2013:
As Sam says: they’re extremely important.
People talk about DNA being the code that life stems from. Why is this? Because DNA is the code that is read by your body’s cells in order to produce each individual protein that your body needs.
Whether it’s a protein that transports things around your cells, fights off infection or simply the material that makes your muscles contract, protein is absolutely vital for life.
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David Briggs answered on 19 Jun 2013:
I work on proteins because proteins do pretty much everything in our bodies.
They are the messengers, engineers, chemists, defenders, and sensors of our bodies. They are incredibly important for life and for diseases in general.
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Susana Teixeira answered on 19 Jun 2013:
I am equally interested in nucleic acids like DNA and RNA. The reason why us crystallographers find these biological molecules so cool is because it is for them that crystals are most useful. Often crystallography is the only, if not the fastest method to determine the structure of relatively large molecules like proteins.
And as it so happens, proteins are just about everywhere in Biology so it is important to track them down and find out what they are doing 🙂
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