DeepMind AI cracks 50-year-old problem of protein folding

[turbinetree]

Having risen to fame on its superhuman performance at playing games, the artificial intelligence group DeepMind has cracked a serious scientific problem that has stumped researchers for half a century.

With its latest AI program, AlphaFold, the company and research laboratory showed it can predict how proteins fold into 3D shapes, a fiendishly complex process that is fundamental to understanding the biological machinery of life.

Independent scientists said the breakthrough would help researchers tease apart the mechanisms that drive some diseases and pave the way for designer medicines, more nutritious crops and “green enzymes” that can break down plastic pollution.

DeepMind said it had started work with a handful of scientific groups and would focus initially on malaria, sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/30/deepmind-ai-cracks-50-year-old-problem-of-biology-research

[Backseat Driver]

1. Wow - mind-blowing article!

https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-predictions-of-protein-structures-associated-with-COVID-19

Computational predictions of protein structures associated with COVID-19

The scientific community has galvanised in response to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, building on decades of basic research characterising this virus family. Labs at the forefront of the outbreak response shared genomes of the virus in open access databases, which enabled researchers to rapidly develop tests for this novel pathogen. Other labs have shared experimentally-determined and computationally-predicted structures of some of the viral proteins, and still others have shared epidemiological data. We hope to contribute to the scientific effort using the latest version of our AlphaFold system by releasing structure predictions of several under-studied proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. We emphasise that these structure predictions have not been experimentally verified, but hope they may contribute to the scientific community’s interrogation of how the virus functions, and serve as a hypothesis generation platform for future experimental work in developing therapeutics. We’re indebted to the work of many other labs: this work wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of researchers across the globe who have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak with incredible agility. [snip]

[burrowowl]

2. Wow!

Very interesting and helpful.

[hlthe2b]

3. Exciting but a big caution in the single word "PRION"

We already have a naturally occurring inciter off abnormal and disease-producing protein folding which results in deadly neurological disease in humans and animals (so-called mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease of deer and elk, scrapie in sheep).

A prion is a type of protein that can trigger normal proteins in the brain to fold abnormally. Prion diseases can affect both humans and animals and are sometimes spread to humans by infected meat products. The most common form of prion disease that affects humans is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

[Backseat Driver]

4. Yep, I thought about those mis-folded protein diseases: prions