BY:
Vincent Bani
|
Wed Oct 09 2024
2024 Nobel price won with help of Ai
The 2024 Nobel price for chemistry was won by three scientist and with the help of Ai in the field of chemistry. The area of focus was on Proteins, the building block of life. The laureates achieved an amazing feat in regards to how we understand protein in an organism.;
In order to understand how proteins work, we need to understand what they look like. So one may ask what are proteins made up of? well proteins are made up of thousands of atoms, and what these protein can do depends on how those atoms are arranged. There are different types of proteins and the only difference between them is the arrangement of the atoms. This arrangements give proteins different shapes and as a result different functions.;
For decades scientist have tried to predict the shapes of these proteins from knowing their amino-acid sequence which are connected in a chain, and then fold itself 3d structures or shapes. These are encoded in the DNA of an organism. The question then was can we predict the structure of these proteins using computers, this would help them understand how life works;
Proteins are called the building blocks of life because they make genetics a possibility. Proteins are huge molecules made from amino acids that help form our bones, hair, skin, body tissues and all parts of the human body. Proteins also form our muscles that enable our bodies to move as well as neurons in our brains, hormones in our bodies and even white blood cells that help fight off disease in our blood.;
In 2003 a scientist called David Baker and his colleagues developed a compulational tool called Rosetta to design these proteins that can perform various functions. So in short, Baker was able to draw these structures in 3 dimension, figure out the sequence of amino acids that could give that structure using Rosetta and after that create these proteins which does not even exist in nature. With this developement Baker opened up a new world of protein structures. However this was not all, predicting this protein structures was next to impossible because the number of possible structures that can be derived from any given sequence is astronomical.;
In 2018 - 2020 two scientist managed to predict this structures using AI with up to 90% accuracy. This was based on neural network called Alpha Fold2. This AI has trained on a huge number sequences and is able to predict the most likely protein structure.;
This caused a complete revolution in structural biochemistry. Alpha Fold 2 was trained on a huge database of proteins and can predict possible structures to a high level of accuracy and with this scientist can design proteins such as a plastic degrading enzymes that breaks down palstics from our environment, antibiotic resistance, protect against viruses, creating nano materials, developing drug inhibitors and much more.;
The 2024 Nobel price for chemistry was won by David Baker (University of washington - USA), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind - UK) and John M. Jumper (Google DeepMind - UK). ; David Baker's role was in computational protein design, while Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper were for accurate
prediction of the protein structure.;
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