Module 6: The Experimentalist

Lab Reality Check

Understand that a computationally designed protein is a hypothesis, not a product. Learn what determines whether a design actually works when expressed in a cell, and develop the critical thinking to anticipate failure modes.

• Treat a computationally designed protein as a hypothesis that is not proven until it is expressed
• Choose an expression system from a protein’s actual requirements rather than by habit
• Predict aggregation risk from surface properties before committing to synthesis
• Diagnose the failure modes that kill designs: buried charges, exposed patches, wrong oligomeric state, unstable folds
• Trace the validation pipeline from gene to functional proof and read what each assay reports