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Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

What is AlphaFold?

AlphaFold is a protein-structure-prediction algorithm created by DeepMind, Google’s AI research laboratory.

What does a protein-structure-prediction algorithm do? It accurately predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences.

It’s relatively easy to analyze the individual components of a protein, but figuring out how a protein actually takes shape in three dimensions — with pieces folding over one another and other molecules — is far more complex.

This is generally referred to as the “protein-folding problem.”

Before AlphaFold, scientists needed to use costly experimental methods in the lab to determine the structure of proteins.

Understanding and predicting protein structures allows for major advances in scientific research, particularly for understanding diseases and designing drugs.

Since AlphaFold was released to the public in 2021, DeepMind’s protein database has grown to include the predicted structures of more than 200 million known proteins:

In an article published in Nature Medicine in 2021, leading researchers claimed that “AlphaFold heralds a data-driven revolution in biology and medicine.”

They might be right. In the three years since AlphaFold was released, it has helped scientists to develop:

• new cancer treatments

• an improved understanding of Parkinson’s disease

• multiple malaria vaccines

• plastic-eating enzymes that could help preserve our environment from pollution

The newest version, AlphaFold3, was released earlier this month in collaboration with the scientific journal Nature.

AlphaFold3 can do more than predict protein structures. It can also predict the structure of DNA, RNA, and “all of life's molecules” according to DeepMind.

One of the coolest things about AlphaFold is that it’s meant to be open-source, meaning that anyone can have access to AlphaFold code.

Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize-winning structural biologist, said that the development of AlphaFold:

ART OF THE DAY

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Yours,
Dan