https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230803213837.htm

"The search space for proteins is enormous," said Brian Coventry, a research scientist with the Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

A protein studied by his lab typically is made of 65 amino acids, and with 20 different amino acid choices at each position, there are 65 to the 20th power binding combinations, a number bigger than the estimated number of atoms there are in the universe.