AI protein-folding algorithms solve structures faster than ever

Predicting protein structures from their sequences would aid drug design.Credit: Edward Kinsman/Science Photo Library The race to crack one of biology's grandest challenges -- predicting the 3D structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences -- is intensifying, thanks to new artificial-intelligence (AI) approaches. At the end of last year, Google's AI firm DeepMind debuted an algorithm called AlphaFold, which combined two techniques that were emerging in the field and beat established contenders in a competition on protein-structure prediction by a surprising margin. And in April this year, a US researcher revealed an algorithm that uses a totally different approach. He claims his AI is up to one million times faster at predicting structures than DeepMind's, although probably not as accurate in all situations. More broadly, biologists are wondering how else deep learning -- the AI technique used by both approaches -- might be applied to the prediction of protein arrangements, which ultimately dictate a protein's function.