Having risen to fame on its superhuman performance at playing games, the artificial intelligence (AI) group DeepMind has cracked a serious scientific problem that has stumped researchers for half a century.
With its latest AI program, AlphaFold, the company and research laboratory showed it can predict how proteins fold into 3D shapes, a fiendishly complex process that is fundamental to understanding the biological machinery of life.
Independent scientists said the breakthrough would help researchers tease apart the mechanisms that drive some diseases and pave the way for designer medicines, more nutritious crops and “green enzymes” that can break down plastic pollution.
DeepMind said it had started work with a handful of scientific groups and would focus initially on malaria, sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease.
“It marks an exciting moment for the field,” DeepMind founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis said. “These algorithms are now becoming mature enough and powerful enough to be applicable to really challenging scientific problems.”
Royal Society president Venki Ramakrishnan called the work “a stunning advance” that occurred “decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”
DeepMind is best known for its run of human-trouncing programs that achieved supremacy in chess, go, Starcraft II and old-school Atari classics. The games provided a training ground for programs that, once powerful enough, would be unleashed on real-world problems.
Protein folding has been a grand challenge in biology for 50 years. An arcane form of molecular origami, its importance is hard to overstate. When researchers know how a protein folds up, they can start to uncover what it does. Scientists have identified more than 200 million proteins, but structures are known for only a fraction of them. Traditionally, the shapes are discovered through meticulous lab work that can take years.
Proteins are chains of amino acids that can twist and bend into a mind-boggling variety of shapes: a googol cubed, or 1 followed by 300 zeros.
To learn how proteins fold, researchers at DeepMind trained their algorithm on a public database containing about 170,000 protein sequences and their shapes.
DeepMind put AlphaFold through its paces by entering it for a biennial “protein Olympics” — the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction.
AlphaFold reached an accuracy comparable to the time-consuming lab-based methods. It had a median score of 92.5 out of 100, with 90 being the equivalent to experimental methods. For the hardest proteins, the median score fell, but only marginally to 87.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Cannabis-based medicines have shown little evidence of effectiveness for treating most mental health and substance-use disorders, according to a large review of past studies published in a major medical journal on Monday. Medical use of cannabinoids has been expanding, including in the US, Canada and Australia, where many patients report using cannabis products to manage conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep problems. Researchers reviewed data from 54 randomized clinical trials conducted between 1980 and May last year involving 2,477 participants for their analysis published in The Lancet. The studies assessed cannabinoids as a primary treatment for mental disorders or substance-use
NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT: US President Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, strangling the Caribbean island’s already antiquated grid Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on Monday, the nation’s grid operator said, leaving about 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the already obsolete generation system. Grid operator UNE on social media said that it is investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that this weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run nation. Officials ruled out a major power plant failure, but had still not pinpointed the root cause of the grid collapse, suggesting a problem with transmission. Officials said that
‘HEALTH ISSUE’: More than 250 women are hospitalized every day due to complications from unsafe abortions, and about three die, a study showed Jane had been bleeding heavily for days before finally seeking help, not from a hospital, but from the man who sold her the pills meant to end her six-week pregnancy. Abortions are strictly outlawed in the mainly Catholic Philippines, forcing women to turn to a patchwork of providers operating in the online shadows. While rare in practice, Philippine law allows for prison terms of up to six years for abortion patients and providers, leaving thousands of Filipinas to search for solutions in online forums where unlicensed sellers promote abortifacients. “It was very painful, as if my abdomen was being twisted,” said Jane, whose
RSS