AI system solves 50-year-old protein folding problem in hours - Livescience.com

DeepMind has created an artificial intelligence system that can rapidly and accurately predict how proteins fold to get their 3D shapes.

The company, DeepMind, which is owned by the same parent company as Google, has created an AI system that can rapidly and accurately predict how proteins fold to get their 3D shapes, a surprisingly complex problem that has plagued researchers for decades, according to The New York Times.

Figuring out a protein's structure can require years or even decades of laborious experimentation, and current computer simulations of protein folding fall short on accuracy.

But DeepMind's system, known as AlphaFold, required only a few hours to accurately predict a protein's structure, the Times reported.

These "strings" fold in intricate ways to create unique structures that determine what the protein can do.

Nearly 50 years ago, scientists hypothesized that you could predict a protein's structure knowing just its sequence of amino acids.

But solving this "protein folding problem" has proved enormously challenging because there are a mind-boggling number of ways in which the same protein could theoretically fold to take on a 3D structure, according to a statement from DeepMind?

Twenty-five years ago, scientists created an international competition to compare various methods of predicting protein structure — something of a "protein olympics," known as CASP, which stands for Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction, according to The Guardian.

For the competition, teams are given the amino acid sequences of about 100 proteins, the structures of which are known but have not been published, according to Nature News.

Then, it used a neural network —  a computer algorithm modeled on the way the human brain processes information — to iteratively improve its prediction of the unpublished protein structures.