Ewen Callaway
Nature (608)
Posted with correction 29 July 22
From today, determining the 3D shape of almost any protein known to science will be as simple as typing in a Google search.
Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet.
The data dump is freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, the London-based AI company, owned by Google, that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, UK.
“Essentially you can think of it covering the entire protein universe,” DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis said at a press briefing. “We’re at the beginning of a new era of digital biology.”
The 3D shape, or structure, of a protein is what determines its function in cells. Most drugs are designed using structural information, and the creation of accurate maps of proteins’ amino-acid arrangement is often the first step to making discoveries about how proteins work.
DeepMind developed the AlphaFold network using an AI technique called deep learning, and the AlphaFold database was launched a year ago with more than 350,000 structure predictions covering nearly every protein made by humans, mice and 19 other widely studied organisms. The catalogue has since swelled to around 1 million entries.
“We’re bracing ourselves for the release of this huge trove,” says Christine Orengo, a computational biologist at University College London, who has used the AlphaFold database to identify new families of proteins. “Having all the data predicted for us is just fantastic.”
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But such entries tend to be skewed toward human, mouse and other mammalian proteins, Porta says. It’s likely that the AlphaFold dump will add significant knowledge, because it includes such a diverse range of organisms. “It’s going to be an awesome resource. And I’m probably going to download it as soon as it comes out,” says Porta.
