AI gets water right: How a hydration shield helps proteins keep their shape

A study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reports that artificial intelligence can enhance protein stability in an unexpected way—by engineering the water around a protein, not just the protein itself. Researchers led by Dr. Kuen-Phon Wu, at Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica and Institute of Biochemical Sciences, National Taiwan University, found that AI-designed ubiquitin-fold proteins can achieve exceptional resilience by creating a protective, "mesostructured" hydration shell on their surface.