Artificial intelligence predicted the structure of the building blocks of life
A new era is opening in biology
A new era of biological research is being opened by Google’s AlphaFold artificial intelligence, after it managed to predict the three-dimensional structure of every protein known to science, practically the building blocks of life. AI provided us with a free, online database of over 200 million protein structures, called AlphaFold DB.
Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take months or even years and now takes seconds. With this new addition of structures shedding light on almost the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved every day!
Amino acid sequences are chained together to produce large proteins that fold and twist like ribbons. By understanding the shape of each protein, scientists can understand how it works, deciphering its main role within cells.
AplhaFold has accelerated this process by offering structures of proteins found in animals, bacteria, plants and other organisms.
The hope came true much faster than we dared to dream. AlphaFold raised a tsunami in the molecular biology community. Last year alone there were over a thousand scientific articles on the structures Alpha Fold revealed from just 1 million predictions. Imagine what will happen to the 200 million structures that are openly available in AlphaFold’s database.
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We expect this feat to trigger an avalanche of new discoveries in the coming months and years. And all this is thanks to the fact that the data is openly available for everyone.
