Artificial intelligence group DeepMind has made a major breakthrough in protein folding.
The research company’s latest AI program, AlphaFold, has solved a problem that has bamboozled scientists for 50 years: predicting how proteins fold into 3D shapes.
Proteins are large, complex molecules made up of chains of amino acids and a protein’s function depends on its unique 3D structure.
Figuring out what shapes proteins fold into is known as the ‘protein folding problem’.
The number of ways a protein could theoretically fold before settling into its final 3D structure is described by DeepMind as ‘astronomical’, with 10^300 possible conformations for a typical protein.