The protein folding problem: a major conundrum of science: Ken Dill at TEDxSBU 

Ken Dill was one of my favorite professors at UCSF back in the 90s. Brilliant and gracious man.

Great guy! Did a postdoc with him back at UCSF. Ken's the relatively rare combination of a renowned researcher at the top of his field who is also a great guy.

An excellent teacher: well paced and employs vivid metaphors and analogies.

Really cool video. I understand a lot more about proteins and why protein folding is important

I had hoped for more info on how protein folding worked

Thanks for such an elegant reminder of where some real and fantastical opportunities lay

I like this talk, Ken made the stuff easy to understand. RU-vid needs more talks like this.

He did a great explanation even for those that do not understand biology

Folding @ home now supports the Coronavirus! If you have a "Gaming Desktop.", please consider donating your processing power for the better of humanity!!

beautiful talk, amazing, thank you!

wow, am moved. thank you sir for this amazing lecture

Thank you so much for such an interesting, fascinating and most educational lecture video!

Very interesting talk. I was hoping he would also address the "mystery" of just how amazingly quickly these complex proteins manage to fold themselves into the shapes they need/want to take on, and maybe how they do it, and how they "know" what shape to take on.

amazing talk, hope this gets more views! let's share it guys

marvelous!! thank you so much for the lecture!! 👍👍👍👍

Thankew for the show,it helped me to understand the fact up to a mark

Best TED talk I've seen.

I love this lecture, explains what we know so nicely and succinctly

Thanks a lot. The future will be much more exciting and fantastic.

This Ted talk was fascinating to me. Not only was it very interesting in itself, but it showed me a bigger picture. A handful of people in the world are advancing humanity's knowledge in ways that could not only improve our individual lives, but could restore our planet to a safe equilibrium point. Some of these people work in science, some of them work in art, etc., but there seem to be very few of them. The rest of us have other jobs or things that keep us busy. I need to adjust my life so that I am supporting people like this guy instead of doing nothing or even working against him by what I do and invest in. This life adjustment includes not only direct support where possible, but also by creating a more peaceful and loving environment among people so that people like this guy can do his work and so the rest of us can reach our potentials. For me, this means less TV, Facebook, and Avengers clips on RU-vid, more thoughtful participation and encouragement of others so they can be the best they can be. I see so few reasons for hope when I read the news. This guy is a leader. He gives me the hope that if our society can survive the small-mindedness and selfishness of our current age, we may be able to save lives and our home by using the amazing gifts that God gave us. If we can't, well, we can see what's coming in the news.

one of the most amazing things i've ever heard from!!!

A good talk. Great for non-scientists.

I worked as a secretary for Dr. Leo Mandelkern at FSU in the early 1980's. His school took the position that polymers were flexible because they had alternating rigid and amorphous segments at the molecular level. The opposing camp was the "folded chain" school. Apparently the latter group won out.

Es la primera vez que veo que las proteínas son planteadas como máquinas o como "nanomaquinas". Excelente charla.

We are made of nanobots! This kind of videos should be trending.

Thank you for the great lecture Sir!

Very cool video, thank you Mr. Dill.

most cristal clear explaination for the more or less solved protein folding problem. thx for that :)

fantastic!

All the protine molecules in my bodys mind was just blown !

Brilliant thank you wonderfully explained. Amazing we can function at all.

Amazing work by DeepMind !

Absolutely astounding, the things we're discovering about life! Wowwwwww

That the human body exists at all, the complexities at the molecular level is just simply astounding. The more we find out, the more we see the design and engineering behind every minute detail.

Great explanation of the power of proteins.

It seems implausible that such incredible complexity could have somehow self-assembled as a result of time + matter + chance. Even the simplest form of life (a single-celled organism) has such mind-boggling complexity.

Silly me...I was expecting a seminar presentation about the protein folding conundrum.

Who's here after the DeepMind news. Age of wonders!

Here after watching The Expanse, completely fascinated by the idea of the protomolecule

Good talk, also the nanotechnology can learn a lot from the technology in our cells.

Question for materialists: if everything can be reduced to protons/neutrons/electrons or even there more rudimentary parts like quantum particles , how do these things work together to produce self replicating biological systems? How did cells start communicating together to create more and more complex and diverse systems that all work in a symbiotic fashion?

This may be the most informative talk that I have ever attended on the subject of proteins.

How wonderful micro mechanism is working in our body ! When I started studying Biotechnology in 1973 in my PG course in Food Technology, I realised it but after advancement in Science and Technology, our understanding is expanding very fast. How wonderful human Brain is to understand and make progress in science and technology !!! At present Micro (Bio) and Macro (Universe) field discoveries ane so wonderful ..

Very impressive and useful presentation ..

There is a tiny tunnel like structure in the cell, a mini factory of about 1 million atoms that does the folding of proteins and we still don't know how it does that. Pretty amazing nano engineering and folks think it was all an accident - seriously?

Except for the 3 billion years this is a brilliant presentation.

Thanks. Great lecture.

Since this was very simple presentation let's add a bit more complexity. Check yourself the amino acid side groups. Some of them them have the acidic COOH (or COO-) others the NH+. Therefore, without the guidance of a ribosome there will be no chain of 150 amino acids, but rather branched structures. This gives a few extra zeroes to the exponent. On the other hand some amino acids can be swapped in the target protein fold without a change in the structure, but mathematically this has been an unsolvable problem so far since it's not always near the active site(s) where the protein destabilizes. NOTE: there are more amino acids than what forms the life and there's still this assumption of just peptide bonds forming AND the reaction stability (in neutral water solution w/o ions) is not taken into account = no hydrolysis of the N-C=O. There is more, but this is high school level chemistry.

I think, what he meant was outside part of inner and matrix of mitochondria. Since ATP synthase is found only in mitochondria inner membrane. @7:33

Great lecture and very well explained. Ken did not mention that molecular machines are irreducibly complex, meaning you can not remove any part of the machine without rendering the machine useless. This in turn is a big conundrum for evolution, as it means they could not have evolved, as all pieces must have been assembled together since the beginning in order for the machine to be functional.

This video was from 7 years ago and today we now have the folding problem solved. I wonder where we’ll be in another 7 years 🤔

I’ve always used the analogy of a popcorn garland, but I guess a string of multicolored pearls works just as well.

That comparison of protein machinery with industrial machineries was great. If we can focus on improving real scale machines, we can also focus on improving the quality of protein machinery preventing degradation link to many diseases!

in ultimate analysis could these solution methods of CASP DeepMind/AlphaFold be extended to estimate the shape/fenotype of the organism given its dna say ?

We love tedx. I've always wondered protein folding problem.

Great talk!

I feel like shape and geometry can only be part of the explenation, I would think that distribution of electric charge/potential in proteins must be important for their function as well

Misleading title. He barely talked about the protein conundrum problem, which is that the odds of a protein folding correctly is 1 /1E164

Very informative!

Very educative indeed

I've always been curious about how do chemical reactions in cells translate to the mechanical movement of a muscle.. but I never found an explanation that doesn't consist of highly advanced biochemistry texts..

RU-vid recommend this to me. In 2020

Great talk. The question I didn't hear mentioned is whether these "machines" are more efficient than our mechanical machines.

abundant knowledge. Hats off Sir.

Holy mother of god, this is amazing.

Little did he know that only 7 years later Alphafold 2 made a breakthrough in this matter.

Marvelous!!

I love his book on statistical thermodynamics: Molecular driving forces

So the sequence is specific for function, but also is the shape.... DNA code provides precise instructions for each protein's aminoacid sequence. How do they miss the DESIGNER, when the design is so evident. Are protein machines the only machines in the universe that emerged by chance, even though we see they work in integrated systems that if altered the stop working?

Physics work differently in a dramatic way on the nano scale at which these protein machines operate. The knowledge of how these protein machines fold and operate is fascinating, but trying apply their behavior to macro-scale machines ignores important differences in the way physics works on the macro scale. Perhaps dispelling the common myth that science should create microscopic robots to "repair" the body by talking about how this is in fact actually the science of designing protein machines would have been a better conclusion than replacing electric vehicles with artificial biological vehicles for example.

thanks you !!!

Very interesting!

I don't think they can scale up to big machines. Like a flea can jump so high but an elephant can't. These proteins are using free energy that is only available at the atomic level. Anyhow, that's how it seems to me. And I wanted to know more about the folding itself. But a great video to help me understand. I wonder also can we get used to the shapes, become familiar with them as tools and machines. I can't visualise strings doing anything so if that picture could be fixed it'd be great.

And... THAT evolved?!

This is exactly how healthcare ought to be modeled; based in genomics and individual health plans that provide for optimal functioning. Each healthcare plan, instead of only being "gold, silver, bronze.." would need to (for lack of better analogy) be further specified by form (what is the right shape of this health plan for Mr.Smith?), material, types of connection (primary care, ancillary care, preventative health) all based upon not just medical and social history, but genomic history.

I came tooooo late, this video was already here in 2013!! Excited, also a bit concerned...

And I thought that proteins are called machines as a metaphor for chemical reactions in a "messy soup of molecules"...They actually are like real mechanical machines :D

WOW What a Beautiful Complicated Design, these impossible impossibility's of chance....

so amazing

super cool thank-you.

I feel like the title was misleading. I was thinking that he was going to mention more on protein finding and what we can do with it or why it can be a "problem". Instead we just got a lecture on what proteins are, how they work, and the fact that it might be cool to check out how proteins work like machines and make real world machines work like them.

wow it has been 5 years since ted has done a real science show...this must have been the last.

This is so amazing. How can anyone possibly believe this happened by chance?

Its so complex and simple at the same time that it makes my brain stall.

Deepmind: hold my chip!

Absolutely fascinating. I had no idea that proteins were basically biological nanotech. Absolutely impossible for this type of complexity from non-sentient chemicals to have randomly resulted in a walking, living, thinking organism. (I don't care how much time elapsed)

As some who does have cystic fibrosis and has struggled with it since birth, I can’t tell you how my life has changed because Trikafta, a modular drug that binds to the CFTR protein that doesn’t fold correctly due to the mutation I have. I have dived into the world of genetics because of CF. My God it is absolutely fascinating. I can finally breath, I no longer have mounds of salt on my skin after I exercise and I no longer cough like I’m dying in the mornings when I wake up. A big shout out to Vertex and it’s scientists, y’all the real MVP.

The metaphors this brilliant man is dropping make this a top notch talk. Very very informative!

I wish he could explain how these bio machines evolved from a single molecule,, that would be interesting.

AND, for a real leap of FAITH, it all came about by accident in a primordial pool over hundreds of thousands of years.

My PhD was a pre-formation study of some kine of protein in order to improve its thermal stability in order to be store at room temperature for several months.

Thank u all very much

Wow to G-d the unbelievable CREATOR OF THESE BRILLIANT MACHINES know as proteins

People still think this happened by chance? All big world machines and information had intelligent designers (of which I'm one), and it stands to reason that more complex machines and data had a more intelligent designer...

Brilliant. Fundamental machines. Whose the designer, and how impressive is how water makes this happen electrostatically.

He has described the basic structural controls of genetics and proteins.

On a related subject, this major development is the silver bullet to and death knoll for natural selection and macro evolution.

protein folding is madd lit SON what you mean its the GOOD GOOD PURPLE GANG FOR LIFE WE THE PURPLEEST PURPLE SCHOOL SHOUTOUT TO MR B FOR BEIN MAD CHILL AND TEACHING ABOUT CELLZ AND BODY PARTS HES MADDD CHILL HE SHOULD BE A SCIENCE PROFESSOR LIKE CMON HE SHOULD BE STACKIN MILLIONS BOIIIIIIIII

Some interesting info.

This talk is incredibly compelling. To think that the minuscule scale of micro-biology can be upscaled to daily life is mindboggling. This is a fascinating idea. Of course, we are at least decades away from realization, perhaps centuries from realization is foreboding. I certainly hope someone will help with money to pursue this issue. I guess that would only be the US government or a college or an individual. This idea m9ght be the most incredible and beneficial idea to the human race that has ever been discussed.