[Image courtesy of DeepMind]
Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind has announced that its AI system AlphaFold has predicted the structure of more than 200 million proteins, representing almost every known cataloged protein. In addition, AlphaFold and its partner, the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, announced that the recent release expanded the database by more than 200 fold, from almost 1 million to more than 200 million structures.“When we launched the database last July, it was sort of recognized as a pretty big leap forward for biology,” said Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO of DeepMind, in a press conference. The release last year included roughly 350,000 high-quality predictions, including all proteins in the human body.
The continued advances of AlphaFold make it possible to search for the 3-D structure of proteins “almost as easily as doing a keyword Google search,” …