This week, Pimp My Protein. We thought, oh, since it's actually really, really stable, we should, you know, take this chance and try to see what we can do to it.

And the world's pluckiest coral reefs thriving against the odds. What we're trying to do is find the places that are doing better than they should, given the conditions that they're exposed to.

Plus bespoke enzymes that use precious metals.

This is the nature podcast for June the 16th, 2016.

I'm Kerry Smith.

And I'm Adam Levy.

The Euro-2016 football tournament kicked off this week in France.

So for the next month, the teams will be doing what they do best,

chasing an icosahedron around a pitch.

Icosahedra are, of course, symmetrical shapes with 20 sides and 60 edges.

And I'm cheating.

The football shape is actually a truncated icosahedron

built from 32 hexagons and pentagons. Nonetheless, shapes like these are not just popular among

footballers. They appear all the time in biology, as they pack closely and they hold a lot of volume

for their size. And that makes them interesting for scientists who want to use

biology's design principles to make new things. Grad student Yang Shah from the University of

Washington in Seattle has made one of these icosahedra out of proteins. They use a software

program called Rosetta to plug in an amino acid recipe and see if the right shape pops out.

When they got the icosahedron out the other end, they then played around with it to add

some bling, fluorescent proteins, and some other proteins to act as gatekeepers to the inside.

I called Yang to see how they did it and what their cages might one day carry.

He started off by comparing his protein building blocks with another tiny construction material, DNA.

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