Putting the power of AlphaFold into the world’s hands | DeepMind
Today, I’m incredibly proud and excited to announce that DeepMind is making a significant contribution to humanity’s understanding of biology.
When we announced AlphaFold 2 last December, it was hailed as a solution to the 50-year old protein folding problem. Last week, we published the scientific paper and source code explaining how we created this highly innovative system, and today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body, as well as for the proteins of 20 additional organisms that scientists rely on for their research.
As researchers seek cures for diseases and pursue solutions to other big problems facing humankind – including antibiotic resistance, microplastic pollution, and climate change – they will benefit from fresh insights into the structure of proteins. Proteins are like tiny exquisite biological machines. The same way that the structure of a machine tells you what it does, so the structure of a protein helps us understand its function. Today, we are sharing a trove of information that doubles humanity’s understanding of the human proteome, and reveals the protein structures found in 20 other biologically-significant organisms, from E.coli to yeast, and from the fruit fly to the mouse.
As a powerful tool that supports the efforts of researchers, we believe this is the most significant contribution AI has made to advancing scientific knowledge to date, and is a great example of the benefits AI can bring to humanity. These insights will underpin many exciting future advances in our understanding of biology and medicine. Thanks to five tireless years of work and a lot of ingenuity from the AlphaFold team, and working closely for the past few months with our partners at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), we are able to share this huge and valuable resource with the world.
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