'The entire protein universe': AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein

The structure of the vitellogenin protein -- a precursor of egg yolk -- as predicted by the AlphaFold tool.Credit: DeepMind 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 some 200 million proteins from 1 million species, covering nearly every known protein on the planet. The data dump will be freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, Google's London-based AI company 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 CEO Demis Hassabis, said at a press briefing. The 3D shape, or structure, of a protein is what determines its function in cells.