DeepMind's AI predicts structures for a vast trove of proteins

The human mediator complex has long been one of the most challenging multi-protein systems for structural biologists to understand.Credit: Yuan He The human genome holds the instructions for more than 20,000 proteins. But only about one-third of those have had their 3D structures determined experimentally. And in many cases, those structures are only partially known. Now, a transformative artificial intelligence (AI) tool called AlphaFold, which has been developed by Google's sister company DeepMind in London, has predicted the structure of nearly the entire human proteome (the full complement of proteins expressed by an organism). In addition, the tool has predicted almost complete proteomes for various other organisms, ranging from mice and maize (corn) to the malaria parasite (see'Folding options').