6 h. ago
AI may help us cure countless diseases – and usher in a new golden age of medicine | Samuel Hume
AlphaFold, which uses AI to find a protein’s structure, has only been around since 2020 but has already had a meteoric impactAlphaFold might be the most exciting scientific innovation of this century. From Google DeepMind, and first reported in 2020, it uses artificial intelligence to figure out a protein’s 3D structure. The technology has already been used to solve fundamental questions in biology, awarded the Nobel prize (in chemistry – to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper) and revolutionised drug discovery. Like most AI, it’s only getting better – and just getting started.A protein’s structure gives us clues about its function, and helps us design new drugs. AlphaFold, which was trained on a huge database of experimentally solved structures called the Protein Data Bank, predicts a protein’s structure based on its amino acid sequence.Solving a decades-old problem: the structure of the nuclear pore complex, one of the biggest structures in the cell. This complex is the guardian of ent...
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