GoKawiil
Tech News
Erica Groussman grew her protein bar company, Trubar, from a tray of samples at local store checkouts into a brand now sold at roughly 32,000 U.S. retail locations, including Costco and Whole Foods. The company shipped nearly 46 million bars in 2026 and generated about $100 million in revenue in 2025, and Groussman sold the business earlier this year for $173 million while remaining as CEO.
Researchers extracted ancient proteins from Middle Pleistocene Xujiayao hominin bone fragments using minimally invasive drilling techniques at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in China. The proteomic data, combined with morphological analysis, were used to compare the Xujiayao specimen's biological profile with known Denisovan characteristics.
Researchers released Pinal, a system that designs functional proteins from natural-language descriptions, under an Apache 2.0 license, with code on GitHub and a public web server. The team withheld full release of its large-scale training corpus and pipeline, citing biosecurity concerns, while publishing inference code, evaluation code, model weights and usage instructions instead. The training data came from AFDB, which excludes viral proteomes, so the developers say Pinal was not built for viral protein design.
Scientists report using generative protein design to build entirely new protein scaffolds that bind metal polypyridine photocatalysts, which previously lacked natural protein partners capable of enantioselective control. Directed evolution refined these designed proteins into artificial metalloenzymes that perform efficient, highly enantioselective light-driven reactions, including with cheap racemic metal complexes, and support high catalyst turnover and recycling. Spectroscopy showed the protein environment extends the photocatalyst's excited-state lifetime and positions substrates to control stereochemistry.
Anthropic, working with Citrini Research, tasked an internal Claude research model with designing minibinder proteins that target scorpion neurotoxins, aiming toward a future antivenom. Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience tested 211 of Claude's designs in the lab, finding 17 that met binding criteria, and Anthropic is publishing all 211 designs and their data publicly.
Ronneil Ramlal and his wife Yuvika Wadhwa launched meal delivery service Protein Chefs in 2015 while Ramlal worked as a UPS supervisor, starting with $2,500 in savings. He left his job in 2017 to run the business full-time, and it now generates over seven figures in annual revenue, up from an earlier $30,000 monthly figure.
Major pharmaceutical companies are directing billions of dollars toward developing 'protein degrader' drugs, a class of medicines designed to eliminate disease-causing proteins inside cells that have traditionally been difficult to target with conventional treatments. Early-stage research suggests these drugs can effectively break down proteins previously considered 'undruggable' using standard small-molecule or antibody approaches.
Researchers used AI protein-design tools to build new enzymes by keeping the catalytic core from two existing protease types and replacing the surrounding protein structure. The engineered enzymes can be tuned to cleave particular target proteins, and the team tested this by using them to cut proteins linked to neurological diseases.
The acknowledgments section of a paper on computational design of metalloproteases thanks staff and collaborators at the Institute for Protein Design for computational and laboratory support, along with researchers who provided reagents and feedback. It also credits beamline facilities at the Advanced Photon Source, National Synchrotron Light Source II and the Center for BioMolecular Structure, funded by the US Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health, for structural data collection.
Scientists reported designing new enzymes capable of cleaving peptide bonds using an activated cysteine nucleophile, achieving success in 13 of 69 designs. The engineered proteases, whose structures differ substantially from natural proteases, accelerated the cutting reaction by up to 30 million times over background rates, and six crystal structures closely matched computational design models. The enzymes also functioned effectively when tested inside mammalian cells.
Researchers created a reinforced ice material called BioPykrete by combining ice with cellulose nanocrystals and a custom-designed protein, CBM3a-AFPIII, that bonds the two together. In small-scale laboratory tests, the composite proved roughly 10 times stronger than ordinary ice and absorbed 70 times more energy before fracturing. The study was published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces.
A long-form explainer details the biology of chemotaxis, the process by which a single E. coli cell detects attractive chemicals and decides whether to swim forward or tumble to change direction. The piece walks through receptor proteins, membrane signaling, chemical modifications that act as memory, and the flagellar motor that drives movement, framing the bacterium as a sophisticated molecular computer rather than a simple organism.