(Nature) – Since it was unveiled in 2020, Google DeepMind’s game-changing AI tool has helped researchers all over the world to predict the 3D structures of hundreds of millions of proteins.

Five years ago, in late November 2020, researchers at London-based Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold2. The artificial-intelligence tool for predicting protein structures generated stunningly accurate 3D models that, in some cases, were indistinguishable from experimental maps, dominating a long-running structure-prediction challenge. The first version of AlphaFold was announced in 2018, but its predictions weren’t nearly as good as its successor, which limited its impact.

The 2021 release of AlphaFold2’s code and a database that has swelled to hundreds of millions of predicted structures mean that scientists can now get a reliable prediction for almost any protein. (Read More)