Nanjing University used AI to design proteins 4x stronger than any natural protein
MikePFrank · x · 2026-09-23
A widely shared post claims Nanjing University researchers published a paper using an AI-guided design framework to engineer proteins from scratch that exceed anything in nature:
- 400% stronger than the best natural proteins like spider silk and titin
- Stable at 150°C without unfolding
- Withstand 1,000+ piconewtons of force
The design targets natural proteins' weaknesses—unfolding under pressure and heat. Note the post's rhetoric ("breaking physical limits of nature") is hyped; see the paper for exact claims.
More from Research
- Microsoft's Taste-Bench: best frontier model scores only 59.7% on long-horizon agent decisions — microsoft · 2026-09-23
- StableVQ: three lightweight fixes for stable vector-quantized tokenizer training — Kwai-Kolors · 2026-09-23
- Lean Pool: an AI-agent-maintained archive of formalized mathematics — Vasily Ilin · 2026-09-23
- Steering-vector loom: turning n completions into vectors to steer model output — repligate · 2026-09-23
- The 1982 Hopfield network is mathematically equivalent to transformer attention — seanmcdonaldxyz · 2026-09-23
- Schmidhuber's annotated AI history: from 1676 chain rule to modern deep learning — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-23