Taking a Clue from Nature Though weinberg and his colleagues at
Symyx are the first to try to commercially apply combinatorial
techniques to materials research, they didn’t invent the
process. In fact, they were beaten out by a few billion years by
a very creative innovator: Evolution. Cells have the ability to
create a wide variety of molecules based on a limited number of
building blocks and then select the ones that function best. In
this familiar evolutionary process, cells create an enormous
variety of DNA and protein molecules by arranging common
building blocks in a different order. Natural selection does the
rest. Beginning in the early 1980s, researchers began imitating
nature’s example. They started creating collections of peptides-
short proteins that can bind to cell receptors and thereby
regulate cell function. Just how well this regulation takes
place depends on how tightly a peptide binds to a receptor,
which itself depends on getting just the right sequence of
peptide building blocks, amino aci