AlphaFold: the structure of proteins revealed
To read about all our work on solving protein folding, go to deepmind.com/AlphaFold or read a timeline of the breakthrough here.
AlphaFold is our AI system that predicts the 3D structure a protein from its 1D sequence of amino acids. We created the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database to share this scientific information with the world. The building blocks of all life are proteins. They underpin the biological processes in every living organism. Because a shape of a proteins is closely related to its function, understanding a protein structure can help us better understand what the protein does and how it functions. This groundbreaking resource was designed to accelerate scientific research worldwide. We also hoped that other teams would be able to learn from our AlphaFold discoveries and use them as a basis for further advancements. This hope became a reality much faster than we could have imagined. In just twelve months, AlphaFold was accessed by over half a million scientists and researchers. It has helped to accelerate progress in solving real-world issues ranging from antibiotic resistance to plastic pollution.
I am incredibly excited today to share with you the next step of this journey. We’re releasing the predicted structures of nearly all proteins catalogued by science in partnership with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute. This will increase the AlphaFold DB 200x, from 1 million to 200 million structures.
Source:
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe
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