AlphaFold releases structures of almost all human proteins

Abstract

The UK company DeepMind and its research partners have released predicted protein structures for nearly every protein expressed in the human body—more than 20,000 of them—for free online. The new database—which also contains 3D structures of the proteomes of 20 other organisms—was made possible by AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence tool of DeepMind, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Along with the 365,000 total protein-structure predictions released with the new study, DeepMind’s research team made public the source code for AlphaFold ( Nature 2021, DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-02025-4 ). AlphaFold shocked the science world last winter when it swept the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction , or CASP, contest by accurately predicting the structures of two-thirds of their own entries. Predicting a protein’s conformation from its sequence alone has been notoriously difficult because of the many ways a chain of amino acids might arrange itself. And determining a protein