The release of AlphaFold last year made a splash in the life-sciences community, whose members have since been scrambling to take advantage of the tool. “Having all the data predicted for us is just fantastic.” High-quality structures “We’re bracing ourselves for the release of this huge trove,” says Christine Orengo, a computational biologist at University College London, who has used the AlphaFold database to identify new families of proteins. The catalogue has since swelled to around 1 million entries. Most drugs are designed using structural information, and the creation of accurate maps of proteins’ amino-acid arrangement is often the first step to making discoveries about how proteins work.ĭeepMind developed the AlphaFold network using an AI technique called deep learning, and the AlphaFold database was launched a year ago with more than 350,000 structure predictions covering nearly every protein made by humans, mice and 19 other widely studied organisms. The 3D shape, or structure, of a protein is what determines its function in cells. “We’re at the beginning of a new era of digital biology.”

“Essentially you can think of it covering the entire protein universe,” DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis said at a press briefing. What's next for AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution The data dump is freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, the London-based AI company, owned by Google, that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, UK. Researchers have used AlphaFold - the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network - to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet. Credit: DeepMindįrom today, determining the 3D shape of almost any protein known to science will be as simple as typing in a Google search.

The structure of the vitellogenin protein - a precursor of egg yolk - as predicted by the AlphaFold tool.

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