India, Sept. 3 -- Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur worked with the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Prof. David Baker at the University of Washington to help design a new kind of small protein.

These proteins can block a group of receptors called GPCRs (G protein-coupled receptors), which are present on the surface of our cells and play a part in how many modern medicines act.

The study titled "De novo design of miniproteins targeting GPCRs" has been published in the journal Nature. It shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to efficiently design and find the miniproteins that attach to specific GPCRs and change how they behave.

The team designed miniproteins for several GPCRs, including two cal...