DeepMind's AI for protein structure is coming to the masses

The structure of human interleukin-12 protein bound to its receptor, as predicted by machine-learning software.Credit: Ian Haydon, UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design Software that accurately determines the 3D shape of proteins is set to become widely available to scientists. On 15 July, the London-based company DeepMind released an open-source version of its deep-learning neural network AlphaFold 2 and described its approach in a paper in Nature1. The network dominated a protein-structure prediction competition last year. Meanwhile, an academic team has developed its own protein-prediction tool inspired by AlphaFold 2, which is already gaining popularity with scientists. That system, called RoseTTaFold, performs nearly as well as AlphaFold 2, and is described in a Science paper also published on 15 July2.