DeepMind is releasing free expansion data with structural predictions for nearly every protein known to science, the company, part of Alphabet’s parent Google, announced today.
DeepMind changed science in 2020 with its AlphaFold AI program, which produces highly accurate predictions about the structure of proteins – information that can help scientists understand how they work, which can help treat diseases. and drug development. It first publicly released the AlphaFold prediction last summer through a database built in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). That initial part contained 98 percent of all human proteins.
Now, the database expands to more than 200 million structures, “covering almost every organism on Earth that has its genome sequenced,” DeepMind said in a statement.
“You can think of it as covering the entire protein universe,” Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, said during a press conference. “We are at the beginning of a new era now in digital biology.”
The AlphaFold protein structure is already widely used by research groups around the world. It has been cited in research on such things as a malaria vaccine candidate and honey bee health. “We believe AlphaFold is the most important contribution AI has made to advance scientific knowledge to date,” Pushmeet Kohli, head of scientific AI at DeepMind, said in a statement.
Alphabet continues to build on the success of AlphaFold. Alphabet has launched a company called Isomorphic Labs that aims to develop AI tools for drug discovery, and although it is different from DeepMind, the two companies will collaborate. DeepMind has also set up a lab at the Francis Crick Institute, where researchers can experiment with information processing in an AI system.
The easy access to the predicted protein structures will further scientists’ research efforts across the scientific landscape – such as those trying to understand how complex systems work in the body or molecules that can be used to target things like pollutants. “With this new set of patterns illuminating almost the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved every day,” Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Institute for Translational Research, said in a statement. .
