A team of scientists in the UK has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges - determining the full 3D shape of proteins. The team at DeepMind developed an AI tool named AlphaFold to accurately predict 3D protein structures from their amino-acid sequences - vastly accelerating efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and thereby enabling quicker and more advanced drug discovery.
“It’s a game changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute. AlphaFold has already helped him find the structure of a protein that had vexed his lab for a decade. He said: “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,”
WATCH THE TEAM TELL THEIR STORY