AlphaFold solves protein folding
A fifty-year-old problem in biology is largely solved by a neural network.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 234 days
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Predicting a protein's three-dimensional shape from its amino acid sequence had resisted effort since the 1970s. DeepMind's AlphaFold2 achieves near-experimental accuracy at the CASP assessment in 2020, and the resulting database of over 200 million predicted structures is released free. Hassabis and Jumper share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is the clearest case so far of machine learning delivering a scientific result rather than a product.