I have said this before, but it is ever more true. When we finally decoded the human genome, finally climbing to the top of that mountain and able to look out over the territory we had just conquered, it turned to be just an even taller mountain right there behind it. We couldn’t see it because we were so obsessed with genes. That next mountain range is proteins and enzymes, which do the actual bidding of the commands of our genes. And until science scales the protein mountain, it will not be able to explain, much less control, life. In The Color of North, co-scientists Shahir Rizk and Maggie Fink explain the marvels of proteins, and how we are mastering them to reset people’s lives. It is a very positive and rewarding field.

Proteins number over 25,000 kinds in humans, and there’s nothing preventing even more of them. Plants and animals contain many more. They are distinguished by the incredible, intricate folds they bend themselves into, folds that are the key to their functioning. A misfold anywhere can turn a helpful protein into a dangerous agent, or nothing at all. Following orders, a protein can fold itself into its required shape in less than a second.

It took Linus Pauling to figure out the business of protein folds. By twisting a belt or a ribbon into a helix we recognize from DNA, it is easy to see there are many more possible points of contact than on just a flat surface. This gives proteins the ability to have many more properties and resources to draw on, even if only hydrogen atoms bridging the gap. It is an efficient, space-saving device proteins leverage for all they are worth.

There are two basic structures formed by proteins. They can bunch together forming a hollow space (a barrel) among them, where they can employ, or trap other components they might need to accomplish their nameplate tasks, or they can lay out side by side in what amount to sheets, which have space-saving advantages over single, wildly shaped proteins as well.

The pecking order is that DNA orders up proteins through RNA, DNA’s messaging service, and RNA has proteins built to order. They’re in every cell. They can be so specialized as to have nothing to do until one day when an invader shows up, or they can be busy all the time, maintaining all the systems that make living beings work.

That’s the basic mechanics of it. Then come the activities. Proteins are the footsoldiers of the body. They police their area, clean up, chew up and swallow trash, and in general keep the trains running on time. For curious scientists, that’s nice, but what can we do to leverage that?

We’ve done silly things, like inserting bioluminescent proteins in plants and animals so they light up in the dark. We’ve been very busy trying to find new uses for the proteins in various snakes’ venoms. Every so often, someone claims to have designed a protein, enzyme or bacterium that eats thousands of times its weight in some toxic substance, or plastic, or carbon.

The authors work hard to humanize this largely biochemical story. Rizk is from Egypt, so his perspective on Great Plains climate where his parents emigrated to is instructive. His intense and enduring interest in discovery topped all, and the USA was completely different planet from the Nile delta, so he had endless diversions to follow. The authors’ paths ended up in the same place - contact with a professor, who inspired their lives’ work, and to whom this book is dedicated. Fink is from Northern Indiana, where she raised her family, and got close to nature. As much as she instinctively hated spiders, she “befriended” one that kept spinning a new web every day, while she tended to her baby. She learned a lot, mostly in respect and admiration, one mom to another. For one thing, spiders can spin out up to seven qualities of filament, and proteins provide instant changes on demand. Spiders even recycle their webs by eating them and spitting them out as cocoon material, so that they must spin a new one daily.

So there are lots of personal stories, about how proteins give special powers to Nile delta fish, or how some frogs allow themselves to completely freeze solid for the winter. Endless tales of superpowers Man might be able to leverage, all thanks to proteins already managing these tasks somewhere else, for some other being. Lignin in tree bark gave trees huge strength advantage over other plants, allowing them to grow many times taller than anything else. This had the happy side effect that trees sucked up carbon that proteins could employ to strengthen the bark, and then also pump out endless air oceans of oxygen that made our kind of life possible. Proteins were at the base of it all.

Along with the personal stories come the scientific stories. The authors try to convince readers not to look at evolution as a progression (monkey-ape-hominid-man) but as branches of a tree. Every limb and leaf is the home to some being, and we can see how they are related in the tree. We can look at limbs to see how they are connected and where they came from, but giving far greater respect to who and where they are now. This works right down to the bottom of the trunk, where a unicellular organism called LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) resides. So the book isn’t just a one-trick pony; it is endlessly engaging.

Proteins have proven amenable to being made into drugs. Massively successful meds like Herceptin and Humira are ways to get highly targeted proteins working in human bodies, reducing inflammation, stopping the misperception of invaders by a rogue immune system, and lots of potential in controlling cancers. This whole new direction promises a pharmacy full of new and innovative drugs from proteins that might not even exist yet. That’s pretty exciting.

It’s protein’s time to shine, sometimes literally.

David Wineberg