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Protein Folding: Google AI’s AlphaFold to Revolutionize BioEngineering
At the end of 2020, Google AI announced a program called AlphaFold that they developed to determine the 3D shape of a protein from its amino-acid sequence. The prediction of protein shape is expected to greatly assist life science and medical researchers.
Proteins control the inner workings of cells and it is the shape of the protein that defines what the protein does.
This is a big deal. In some sense the problem is solved. We have been stuck on this one problem – how do proteins fold up – for nearly 50 years. To see DeepMind produce a solution for this, having worked personally on this problem for so long and after so many stops and starts, wondering if we’d ever get there, is a very special moment.
Professor John Moult, Co-founder and Chair of CASP (Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction), University of Maryland
It’s a game changer. This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.
Andrei Lupas, evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany
Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University, said that “I think it’s fair to say this will be very disruptive to the protein-structure-prediction field. I suspect many will leave the field as the core problem has arguably been solved. It’s a breakthrough of the first order, certainly one of the most significant scientific results of my lifetime.”
