Explore how origami, the age-old tradition of paper folding, is analogous to one of the hardest problems in biology today—predicting a protein’s folded shape—in this video from NOVA: The Origami Revolution. A protein’s specific three-dimensional shape determines its function in the body. Failure to fold correctly can lead to disease. Because protein folding is essential for life, scientists are trying to predict which shapes, out of trillions of possibilities, are the most stable. To do so, they use computers to simulate the ways different protein sequences could fold and the shapes these could produce. This resource is part of the NOVA Collection.