AlphaFold

Google DeepMind's AI system that predicts a protein's 3D structure from its sequence of amino acids.

• Proteins are chains of 20 kinds of amino acid that fold into precise shapes, and the shape determines function and where drugs can bind.
• Lab methods like X-ray crystallography can take months to years per structure; AlphaFold 2 often matches their accuracy in minutes.
• DeepMind released predicted structures for over 200 million proteins; Hassabis and Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• AlphaFold 3 (2024) models complexes with DNA, RNA and drug molecules, but it predicts static shapes, while real proteins flex and move.