"In those five years, AlphaFold 2 and its successor AI models have become almost as fundamental and ubiquitous tools of biochemical research as microscopes, petri dishes, and pipettes. The AI models have begun to transform the way scientists search for new medicines, promising faster and more successful drug development. And they are starting to help scientists work on solutions to everything from ocean pollution to creating crops that are more resilient to climate change."
""The impact has really exceeded all of our expectations," John Jumper, the senior Google DeepMind scientist who leads the company's protein structure prediction team, told Fortune. In 2024, Jumper and Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work creating AlphaFold 2. Learning how to use AlphaFold to make protein structure predictions is now taught as a standard tool to many graduate-level biology students around the world."
AlphaFold 2 predicts a protein's three-dimensional structure from its DNA sequence with high accuracy. In five years, AlphaFold 2 and successor AI models have become fundamental, ubiquitous tools of biochemical research comparable to microscopes and pipettes. The models accelerate and improve drug discovery and enable new work on ocean pollution mitigation and development of climate-resilient crops. The technology earned its creators a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. Training on databases of protein DNA sequences and known protein structures allowed Transformer architectures to replace many time-consuming, expensive laboratory structure-determination experiments. Learning to use AlphaFold is now standard graduate training.
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