Researchers at the DeepMind Technologies artificial-intelligence lab said Thursday they had predicted the structure of nearly all known proteins, a significant advance in biology that will accelerate drug discovery and help address problems such as sustainability and food insecurity.
The London-based lab, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet Inc., developed an algorithm called AlphaFold that predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins, molecules that are found in all living organisms and play essential roles in the functioning of cells. The project was initiated in 2016. Last July, DeepMind released an AlphaFold database with nearly one million predicted proteins, allowing researchers and labs around the world to make use of it for any purpose.