Contemporary · Europe · Science

2020

AlphaFold solves protein folding

November 4, 2020

DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 essentially solved a problem that had stumped biology for fifty years: predicting how a string of amino acids will fold into a three-dimensional protein shape. Within two years it had modeled nearly every known protein on Earth, making the entire database freely available to researchers. Drug discovery and structural biology had a new starting line.