Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:
Previously met with skepticism, AI won scientists a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2024 after they used it to solve the protein folding and design problem, and it has now been adopted by biologists across the globe. AI models like artificial neural networks and language models help scientists solve a variety of problems, from predicting the 3D structure of proteins to designing novel antibiotics from scratch. Researchers press on with the refinement of AI models, addressing their limitations and demonstrating widespread applications in biology.
A major sore spot for protein biologists, the protein-folding problem has now been solved by AI, winning University of Washington biochemist David Baker and DeepMind researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. After struggling for around two decades to determine the tertiary structure of proteins from the sequence of their amino acids, scientists established the Critical Assessment of Structural Prediction (CASP) competition in 1994 to foster collaboration in this area. In 1998, Baker’s team built the Rosetta software for protein energy configuration modelling; in fact, a few years later, the team turned their computational model into a game called Foldit to rope in volunteers to partake in solving protein structures.
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