This artificial intelligence is capable of predicting the structure of millions of proteins
Research in biology could change forever after AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence developed by DeepMind, recently managed to update its databases with the information of 200 million proteins, which according to the scientists who used it, “is the information of all organisms on Earth whose genome has been sequenced.”
AlphaFold, was created in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and from its inception it was sought to be able to accurately predict the molecular structure of all proteins known to science to date, this with the aim of advancing at a higher speed in developments and innovations in the health sector, such as the invention of new medicines and the discovery of cures for different diseases.
Likewise, it is planned that all the information found by this technology will be made available to the entire scientific community in the world, as Pushmeet Kohli, director of AlphaFold stated that this “is the greatest contribution of AI to scientific knowledge to date.” the date”.
Until before this artificial intelligence began its operation, identifying the molecular structure of a single protein required long research and experimentation processes, which meant that, for example, the development of new drugs took time, however, the news of that this technology has expanded its database by 200, implies an advance for science.
deepmind, the company that created this artificial intelligence, in July 2021 had published the most complete map with human proteins in history to date, with almost a million biological structures. But now The record has been extended and they have revealed the composition of the 200 million proteins found, which corresponds to all the living beings that inhabit the planet, including animals and plants. In this way, all the scientific teams in the world will have at their disposal a great work tool.
The interesting thing about the matter is that Without the support of this technology, it would have taken human civilization thousands of years to manually find all the molecular structures of these millions of proteins. So the speed of this computer system is incomparable.
Likewise, the influence of this technology is already beginning to permeate different facets of everyday life, since Isomorphic Labs is a pharmaceutical company that was founded for the purpose of producing medicines based on AlphaFold’s discoveries.
It should be clarified that this artificial intelligence was created by Alphabet, which in turn is part of Google, and for this reason Sundar Pichai, CEO of the organization and in turn of the Silicon Valley technology company, has described AlphaFold as a “giant milestone”
For their part, some members of the global scientific community have already begun to speak out. Specifically, Eric Topol, director of one of the most prestigious biomedical research centers in the world, the Scripps Research assured that: “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, now it takes seconds. With this new addition of structures that describe almost the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved every day.”
