Congratulations to 2026 #LaskerAward winners Emmanuel Mignot of @StanfordMed and Masashi Yanagisawa of the @UNIV_TSUKUBA_EN! For identification of orexin, a brain peptide that maintains wakefulness, and the discovery that orexin deficiency causes uncontrolled sleep in #narcolepsy — revealing a key insight into the nature of sleep.
#Lasker2026 #LaskerLaureate
David Baker’s team is pushing AI protein design into its next phase. 🧬
AI models can now generate millions of protein designs — but the bottleneck has shifted from creation to validation.
In their latest Nature Communications paper, the Baker Lab develops a scalable experimental characterization platform to rapidly test AI-designed proteins and close the loop between Design → Build → Test → Learn.
The future of protein engineering may not just be bigger models — it may be faster feedback loops between AI and the wet lab.
Paper: https://t.co/aYcVOkGFck
3 papers @ScienceMagazine provide a clear picture of the features of opsins that lead to different spectral properties, activation and inactivation kinetics, and recycling 🇨🇳🇯🇵🇨🇭
https://t.co/tEr8lCAVo8
https://t.co/fbsFVf3Cb4
https://t.co/izulENn4aI