How AI protein structure prediction and design won the Nobel prize
By 
Jamie Durrani2024-10-17T11:07:00
David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry. Jamie Durrani investigates the origins of a biochemistry revolution
AlphaFold’s ability to accurately predict proteins’ 3D structures has been repeatedly described as a revolution for biochemistry, a sentiment echoed by the Nobel committee as it announced that Jumper and DeepMind’s chief executive Demis Hassabis had scooped one half of this year’s prize.
The other half of the prize went to David Baker, a pioneer of protein design, whose lab at the University of Washington, US, has spent over two decades opening an entirely new realm of unnatural proteins.
The tools developed by the DeepMind team and Baker’s lab use AI to tackle two related problems that have captivated scientists for decades: how to determine a protein’s structure given only the sequence of amino acids that is made from, and how to create new proteins that take on shapes and perform functions never before seen in nature.