The American architect Irving Geis He received an unusual assignment in 1961: to draw by hand the first structure of a protein revealed thanks to X-rays. It was myoglobin, responsible for oxygenating muscles and the red color of meat. It is a kind of necklace with 153 pearls, which is folded forming eight propellers tangled It took Geis six months to draw it, but his effort managed to awaken world fascination towards that invisible inner world. Now, science has accelerated. The artificial intelligence company DeepMind, owned by Google, managed to accurately predict the structure of more than 200 million proteins, almost all known ones. A Spanish bioinformatician, Inigo Barrio, has helped organize that chaos, grouping them in similar ways. Their work reveals surprising data. Human beings have 13 exclusive structures, which do not appear in any other living being. A ubiquitous bacteria in soil, Acidobacteria bacterium, has almost 1,900 unique shapes.
