As people around the world marveled in July at the most detailed pictures of the cosmos snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope, biologists got their first glimpses of a different set of images — ones that could help revolutionize life sciences research.
The images are the predicted 3-D shapes of more than 200 million proteins, rendered by an artificial intelligence system called AlphaFold. “You can think of it as covering the entire protein universe,” said Demis Hassabis at a July 26 news briefing. Hassabis is cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, the London-based company that created the system. Combining several deep-learning techniques, the computer program is trained to predict protein shapes by recognizing patterns in structures that have already been solved through decades of experimental work using electron microscopes and other methods.
To read more, click here.