DeepMind's AlphaFold2 won the CASP14 protein structure prediction competition by a wide margin and was recognized by the organizers as a solution to the 50-year-old protein folding problem. It scored 92.4 GDT, with predictions averaging 1.6 angstroms of error — about the width of an atom — three times more accurate than the next best system and comparable to experimental methods. The system used an attention-based network that refined a structure graph using evolutionarily related sequences, multiple sequence alignment, and a representation of amino acid residue pairs. It sits outside the generative AI lineage, but was widely reported at the time as a case of AI actually solving a hard scientific problem. Hassabis and Jumper would receive the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work.
30November 2020
ResearchConfirmed
AlphaFold2 is judged to have solved protein folding
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Tags
- science
- deepmind
- alphafold
- milestone
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Later developments
22 July 2021 · Development
DeepMind published AlphaFold's methodology in Nature and open-sourced the code, and together with EMBL-EBI launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, releasing predicted structures for human and other organisms' proteins for free.