Open data key to cracking the protein structure prediction problem

Proteins are the building blocks for all living things, providing structure and managing processes in cells. Understanding how these molecules fold into specific 3D shapes is key to understanding their function but requires expensive equipment and lots of time, limiting the progress of research and development. A new artificial intelligence programme called AlphaFold has been shown to accurately predict protein structure in minutes, solving a decades old challenge. Its success is built on the availability of thousands of experimentally determined protein structures, a result of long-term research funding, infrastructure investment and data-sharing policies. DeepMind, the developers of AlphaFold, have made the AlphaFold code and protein structure predictions openly available to the global scientific community.