It is an exciting time in the lab now as we are recovering from the craziness of CASP. While Bin and Rhiju are taking an incredibly well deserved vacation, the new HIV vaccine design project is starting to come into full swing. We now have computationally designed amino acid sequences for 15 potential vaccine candidates, and we will start the process of making them next Tuesday; the first step is to synthesize genes which encode these proteins. We have also designed a whole series of novel enzymes which catalyze a wide variety of reactions, and are starting the gene synthesis process for these as well.

I'm particularly interested now in designing enzymes which destroy organophosphate compounds which are the key ingredients in many pesticides and nerve agents. On rosetta@home, we are carrying out calculations in which we are resampling regions of the landscape found to be low energy in initial sets of runs and we hope these will lead to significant improvements in our abilities to find global minima.