We are witnessing the birth of a revolution in the world of biology. AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence of DeepMind, has just grow your database to incredible levels. Two years after its arrival, AlphaFold is already able to offer information on more than 200 million proteins. What this means, according to officials, the information from “every organism on Earth whose genome has been sequenced“.
AlphaFold, in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), is software that very accurately predicts the molecular structure of proteins. Extremely useful information to be able to know precisely how they work. And later to be able to develop drugs and cure diseases. Because the best thing about AlphaFold is not only its enormous computational potential for understanding biology, but also that all this information is available to the entire scientific community.
“AI’s greatest contribution to scientific knowledge to date”
AlphaFold’s reach is huge, so much so that Pushmeet Kohli, Director of AI at DeepMind, calls it “AI’s greatest contribution to scientific knowledge to date.”
Until now, understanding the complex structure of each protein required long and tedious experiments to verify its final shape and to be able to design specific drugs. Now, this work is done by the AI with extremely high precision. Yes in just one year he managed to multiply his knowledge by 200.
In July 2021, DeepMind released what was already the the most comprehensive map of human proteins to date with nearly a million structures. Today, DeepMind not only republished this map, but expanded it to 200 million protein structures to cover virtually all known living organisms and correspond to practically all scientific knowledge to date.
The speed at which AI is able to understand protein structure is much faster than what humans can do manually. To match the work of AlphaFold, humans without this technology would have taken thousands of years.
DeepMind is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said research described as a “giant milestone”. AlphaFold’s reach is already paying off in the form of other companies, such as with the created by Isomorphic Labsa company dedicated to creation of new drugs based on AI calculations.
“Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take months or years, now it takes seconds. With this new addition of structures that describe almost the entire universe of proteins, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved every day“, described Eric Topol, director of Scripps Research, one of the most prestigious biomedical centers in the world.
More information | DeepMind