Burst of Protein Structure Predictions from DeepMind, EMBL
July 23, 2021
The tremors that shook the life sciences community last December were mere prelude. Back then, at a biennial protein-prediction competition, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called AlphaFold delivered an outstanding performance, predicting structures quite as well as X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), the gold standard experimental techniques. Now, AlphaFold has produced an eruption: a release of more than 350,000 protein structure predictions. Besides covering nearly the entire human proteome, the release also extends to biologically significant organisms such as
Escherichia coli, fruit fly, mouse, zebrafish, malaria parasite, and tuberculosis bacteria.
The AlphaFold release was arranged by AlphaFold’s developer, DeepMind, and by DeepMind’s scientific partner, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Both DeepMind and the EMBL contributed to two articles that were