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 lead s to approximately 1.13x1065 potential combinations to test—that's 113 followed by 65 zeroes, or five times as many zeroes as a trillion has. ...read more read less