How AlphaFold can realize AI's full potential in structural biology

Tomorrow's AI applications will not happen without research being shared openly in repositories such as that maintained by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge, UK.Credit: Edmund Sumner/View Pictures/Universal Images Group/Getty "I wake up and type AlphaFold into Twitter." He was talking to Nature in April for a News Feature on how software that can predict the 3D shape of proteins from their genetic sequence is changing biology (Nature 604, 234–238; 2022). Jumper leads the team at London-based company DeepMind that developed the AlphaFold software. Last week, DeepMind, part of the Google family, announced that its researchers have used AlphaFold to predict the structure of 214 million proteins from more than one million species -- essentially all known protein-coding sequences. 'The entire protein universe': AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein AlphaFold is clearly one of the most exciting developments to hit the life sciences in recent decades.