Andy Kleist was in a tire shop when he read a paper that changed his career. He was getting his M.D.-Ph.D. in Milwaukee, researching a set of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors, and had printed out a study from computational biologist M. Madan Babu. What struck him, as he waited to get a flat replaced, wasn’t just the science — it was how Babu had illustrated it.
“It’s like the Apple products of science,” said Kleist. “You can look at it and just understand the thing without having to read it. There’s a simplicity and a beauty in the way the information is digested and presented.”
A few years later, Kleist mimicked that style in one of his own posters, and Babu noticed — inviting Kleist to lunch and ultimately to work with his research group in England. With their colleagues, they’ve published work in Science, Nature Genetics, and Cell that investigates protein function at the atomic level, illuminating fundamental mechanisms behind protein interactions.
Their latest paper worked to crack the code that tells cells where to travel in the body. To land in the right place, a cell follows a “breadcrumb trail” of chemokines, which bind to those G protein-coupled receptors on its surface. To describe how dozens of chemokines interact with nearly two dozen GPCRs, they tried out plenty of metaphors, including one based on British postal codes. Finally, they landed on encryption, describing the interactions as a process of secret messages being encoded and decoded.
“To me, that’s a lot of the fun part,” said Kleist — making sure that no matter how complex the science is, someone can get to the heart of it quickly.
— Katie Palmer
