AI lab DeepMind cracked the protein folding problem, changing biology - Vox.com

The breakthrough: DeepMind says its AI system, AlphaFold, has solved “the protein folding problem” — a grand challenge of biology that has vexed scientists for 50 years.

They start out as strings of amino acids (imagine the beads on a necklace) but they soon fold up into a unique three-dimensional shape (imagine scrunching up the beaded necklace in your hand).

That 3D shape is crucial because it determines how the protein works.

The trouble is, predicting which shape a protein will take is incredibly hard.

Every two years, researchers who work on this problem try to prove how good their predictive powers are by submitting a prediction about the shapes that certain proteins will take.

DeepMind took home the win that year, but it still hadn’t solved the protein folding problem.

This year, though, its AlphaFold system was able to predict — with impressive speed and accuracy — what shapes given strings of amino acids would fold up into.

The AlphaFold technology still needs to be refined, but assuming the researchers can pull that off, this breakthrough will likely speed up and improve our ability to develop new drugs.

The protein folding problem was a perfect thing to tackle.

DeepMind is a world leader in building neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence loosely inspired by the neurons in a human brain.

So, for example, you can present it with many thousands of strings of amino acids and show it what shape they folded into.

This is exactly the sort of problem at which neural networks excel, and DeepMind recognized that, marrying the right type of AI to the right type of puzzle.