Predictions of Most Human Protein Structures Made Freely Available

The AlphaFold program from AI firm DeepMind has amassed a huge database of protein structures from humans and model organisms.

Lisa Winter

| 3 min read

Q8W3K0, listed in the DeepMind database as a potential plant disease resistance protein from Arabidopsis thaliana

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ABOVE: Q8W3K0, listed in the DeepMind database as a potential plant disease resistance protein from Arabidopsis thaliana
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Update (July 29, 2022): Nature reports that AlphaFold has now predicted the structure of more than 200 million proteins spanning 1 million species—nearly every known protein. These structures will soon be freely available online through DeepMind’s database.

A solid understanding of a protein’s structure can lend crucial insight into the mechanism of certain biological processes or provide a starting point for developing a new drug. AlphaFold, a program from the UK-based artificial intelligence firm DeepMind, has made significant strides in reducing the time needed to predict a protein’s structure from months to minutes with unparalleled accuracy. Now, a paper published July 22 in Nature reports that a collaboration between AlphaFold and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) has built a publicly-available database containing more than 350,000 protein structures.

“This understanding means we ...

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Meet the Author

Lisa Winter
Lisa Winter became social media editor for The Scientist in 2017. In addition to her duties on social media platforms, she also pens obituaries for the website. She graduated from Arizona State University, where she studied genetics, cell, and developmental biology.
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