In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Zhibin Guan and former student Dora Guzman in Chemistry, with collaborators Prof. Pierre Baldi and Arlo Randall in the School of Information and Computer Sciences, reported a poly(protein) with exceptional mechanical stability. The protein discovery and mechanistic understanding were achieved through a combination of bioinformatics search, computation, protein engineering, and single molecule force spectroscopic studies.