Fighting Disease With Good Grammar

“Grammar may have gone out of fashion in English lessons, but it is making a comeback as a weapon for fighting disease. Some short chains of amino acids have been found to kill antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Gregory Stephanopoulos at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues reasoned that if the amino acid sequences of these peptides were treated as a language with grammatical rules, the rules could be used to create new peptides with similar properties.”