Question: how do you make protiens? What do you make them out of?

Sam Lear answered on 20 Jun 2014:

The way I make proteins is a bit different to how the protein-making machinery makes them in living things.

The machinery – called the ‘ribosome’ – is amazingly efficient and precise at joining amino acids together to make a protein. While I am effectively doing the same reaction (the bonds between amino acids in my proteins are the same as those in natural proteins), the amino acid ‘building blocks’ I use have to be specially modified to stop bits of them reacting when they shouldn’t/at the wrong stage in the reaction.

There are companies which sell these modified amino acids, and we simply buy them as powders and add them at the right step (along with other chemicals that make the reaction happen) to build the protein one reaction at a time.