The instruments
The instruments: 6 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Machine That Read a Protein One Letter at a Time
A Swedish chemist devised a reaction in 1950 that peeled one amino acid at a time from a chain. Seventeen years later, in a Melbourne hospital laboratory, he and a colleague built a machine to do it unattended. It ruled protein chemistry for two decades, then was overtaken.
The Column That Separated Everything
A Russian-Italian botanist poured a leaf extract through a tube of powdered chalk and watched it split into coloured bands. A century later, the same idea decides whether a peptide can be called pure.
The Crystal and the Beam
In 1935 a young researcher in Oxford took an X-ray photograph of an insulin crystal and saw that it was ordered enough to be solved. It took another thirty-four years to solve it.
The Machine That Learned to Weigh a Molecule
To weigh a molecule you first have to get it airborne and give it a charge. For most of the twentieth century, doing that to a protein simply destroyed it — until a chemist in his sixties started spraying them out of a needle.
The Microscope That Had to Be Frozen
An electron microscope destroys biological material while it looks at it, and the vacuum it works in boils away the water any protein needs. Cryo-EM is the long story of getting around both problems at once.
The Prediction That Outran the Experiment
For twenty-five years a blind competition asked whether anyone could predict a protein's shape from its sequence, and for twenty-five years the answer was: a little, sometimes. Then one entry stopped being wrong.