If you could unravel a protein you would see that it’s like a string of beads made of a sequence of different chemicals known as amino acids. These sequences are assembled according to the genetic instructions of an organism's DNA.

Attraction and repulsion between the 20 different types of amino acids cause the string to fold in a feat of ‘spontaneous origami’, forming the intricate curls, loops, and pleats of a protein’s 3D structure. For decades, scientists have been trying to find a method to reliably determine a protein’s structure just from its sequence of amino acids.

This grand scientific challenge is known as the protein folding problem.

Animation by Across The Pond