AlphaFold 2.0 in 2 minutes
Technologies like Artificial intelligence are said to be future of the world. These are the ones which would enhance our existing systems and make human life easy and advanced. Use of AI is now, not just limited to engineering science but can be used in various other fields like biology too. One of the example for this is Google Deepmind developed ‘AlphaFold2’.
Proteins are essential to life and many of them have got really complex structures. Predicting their 3D structure was a major challenge in the field of biology as it can impact disease understanding and drug delivery; until AlphaFold 2 got developed.
AlphaFold 2 basically, analyses a large genomic datasets present in proteins and then based on that, predicts it’s structure.The learning algorithms used in AlphaFold 2 is deep neural networks. The unique feature about AlphaFold 2 is that it achieved this state of art by using only 30K training examples. The AlphaFold 2 generated model has got maximum accuracy than the previous model CASP13 and thus marking significant progress in field of biology.
With such technologies in hand, scientists or researchers find ease to study on drugs through protein structures and find optimal solution. AlphaFold 2 is also successfully used to predict the structure of proteins from SARS-Cov-2 virus; thus, has lead to help in development of drugs/vaccines on the covid19 outbreak. It’s also exciting to see these early signs of progress in protein folding, demonstrating the utility of AI for scientific discovery.
What a time to be alive!!!
References:
1. https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-scientific-discovery : Google deepminds
2. https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-predictions-of-protein-structures-
associated-with-COVID-19 :Research development on novel coronavirus
3. Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning:Andrew W. Senior, Richard Evans, Demis Hassabis
Article Published: 15 January 2020 :https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1923-7#citeas
4. https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology
