On November 30th, Google’s DeepMind made history by way of their AlphaFold Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) algorithm. AlphaFold has essentially solved the “protein folding problem”, which has challenged researchers to determine a protein’s 3D shape directly from its amino acid sequence for the past 50 years.
As proteins are the building blocks of life, and because the way they work is determined by their shape, cracking this problem is a big leap forward in understanding how biological systems operate at molecular scales.
Academics, famous for their stoicism, did not hold back in their praise. …
Alexander Dante Camuto
Researcher in Probabilistic Machine Learning
