Artificial Intelligence Predicts The Structure of Almost Every Protein Ever Found

A new era of biological research has been unlocked, with an artificial intelligence (AI) predicting the 3D shape of nearly every protein known to science – just one year after its first data release. Thanks to AlphaFold, an AI tool developed by the Google-owned AI company DeepMind, more than 200 million protein structures have now been shared online in a free-to-access, searchable database, called AlphaFold DB. The accomplishment paves the way for untold avenues of scientific exploration into proteins, the building blocks of life. And researchers are giddy with excitement. "Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds," cardiologist Eric Topol from the Scripps Research Translational Institute explained in a statement about the data release.