AlphaFold predicts the human proteome

This is truly amazing.

The human genome holds the instructions for more than 20,000 proteins. But only about one-third of those have had their 3D structures determined experimentally. And in many cases, those structures are only partially known.

Now, a transformative artificial intelligence (AI) tool called AlphaFold, which has been developed by Google’s sister company DeepMind in London, has predicted the structure of nearly the entire human proteome (the full complement of proteins expressed by an organism). In addition, the tool has predicted almost complete proteomes for various other organisms, ranging from mice and maize (corn) to the malaria parasite (see ‘Folding options’).

The approximately 365,000 structure predictions deposited this week should swell to 130 million — nearly half of all known proteins — by the year’s end, says Sameer Velankar, a structural bioinformatician at EMBL-EBI. The database will be updated as new proteins are identified and predictions improved.