Rice University Apr 13 2026 Protein engineering is a field primed for artificial intelligence research. Each protein is made up of amino acids; to optimize a protein function, researchers modify proteins by switching out one of 20 different amino acids for another. For a protein that is just 50 amino acids in length, this leads to approximately 1.13x1065 potential combinations to test - that's 113 followed by 65 zeros, or five times as many zeros as a trillion has.  This number of potential