Dr Dobson and Dr Serrano have now shown that mutations, used judiciously, can actually suppress it and that they can do so without changing the protein's structureand function.
But studying the structure of the antibody and the protein on the flu virus that it targets could make it that much more likely for a universal vaccine to be developed.
They exposed gliadin to digestive enzymes in test tubes and were able to identify a protein fragment made up of 33 amino acids that was resistant to further digestion and whose structure was known to be toxic.
Instead, differences in composition between warm-water and cold-water ion channels were the result of a phenomenon called RNA editing, in which special enzymes alter the structure of the RNA messenger, and thus of the final protein.
The goal is either to design an entirely new protein, or to predict a certain structure, so that once an online model is generated, scientists and biotech companies take over.