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Why in the News?
Recently, DeepMind, a company owned by Google, announced that it had predicted the three-dimensional structures of more than 200 million proteins using AlphaFold.Key Points:
About
Alpha Fold
- AlphaFold is a protein structure prediction tool based on Artificial Intelligence.
- It is fed with protein sequences as input. In it, the Protein sequences enter through one end; the predicted three-dimensional structures come out through the other end.
- It is based on “training, learning, retraining and relearning”.
- It predicts the structures of the entire 214 million unique protein sequences deposited in the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) database.
- It is based on a computer system model called a deep neural network.
- Neural networks use a large amount of input data and provide the desired output exactly like how a human brain would.
What are the implications of this development?
- AlphaFold helps to understand the protein structure which in turn is essential for understanding human diseases.
- AlphaFold is a watershed movement in science and structural biology, as earlier techniques such as x-ray crystallography predicted protein structures mainly on trial-and-error methods.
- AlphaFold has already helped scientists to accelerate their discoveries in vaccine and drug development.
- Understanding accurate structures of COVID-19 virus proteins in days rather than years will accelerate vaccine and drug development against the virus.
