AlphaFold

AlphaFold is a DeepMind deep learning system that predicts the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino-acid sequence. Protein shape largely determines function; predicting it from sequence alone had resisted researchers for decades.

AlphaFold2 (2020) reached accuracy competitive with slow laboratory methods on the CASP structure-prediction challenge. DeepMind later released predicted structures for hundreds of millions of known proteins. In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work (with David Baker for computational protein design). See the article and timeline.