Artificial intelligence in structural biology is here to stay

"I didn't think we would get to this point in my lifetime." That's how one research leader in structural biology responded to last week's publication of research in which artificial intelligence (AI) was used to predict the structure of more than 20,000 human proteins, as well as that of nearly all the known proteins produced by 20 model organisms such as Escherichia coli, fruit flies and yeast, but also soya bean and Asian rice. That is a combined total of around 365,000 predictions1. The data, publicly accessible for the first time (see https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk), were released online on 22 July by researchers at DeepMind, a London-based AI company owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, and the European Bioinformatics Institute, based at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EBI-EMBL) near Cambridge, UK. DeepMind's AI predicts structures for a vast trove of proteins The DeepMind team developed a machine-learning tool called AlphaFold.