The “most significant contribution AI has made to science”: Google’s AlphaFold will release the structure of every protein known to science - ZME Science

The same AI that surpassed humans in games like Go, chess, or Starcraft has now been used to predict the structures of almost every protein made by the human body.

Its “Alpha” series AI became very good at chess, becoming arguably the best chess player the world had ever seen; then, it mastered Go — a game that’s about 1 million trillion trillion trillion trillion times more complex than chess.

Several degenerative diseases and allergies are caused by incorrect folding of some proteins, because the immune system doesn’t produce antibodies for some protein structures.

In 2018, the team announced that AlphaFold 2 (the second version of the protein folding algorithm) has become quite good at predicting the 3D shapes of proteins, surpassing all other algorithms.

Now, the company has announced it’s predicted the shapes of nearly every protein in the human body as well as hundreds of thousands of other proteins found in 20 of the most widely studied organisms, including yeast, fruit flies, and mice — a trove of 350,000 proteins.

Over the next few months, DeepMind says it will release the folding structure of another 100 million proteins — virtually all proteins known to science.

Much like the Human Genome Project drove massive advancements in the field of medicine, a similar library for proteins (proteome) could drive a new revolution in medicine.

For 36% of human proteins, it flagged correctly down to the level of individual atoms — which is good enough for drug development.

Over half of the predicted proteins are good enough to enable researchers to understand the proteins’ function.