This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to David Baker from the University of Washington "for computational protein design," and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper from Google DeepMind "for protein structure prediction." Half the prize will go to Baker, and the other half will be split between Hassabis and Jumper.
The human body uses tens of thousands of different proteins, each a string of dozens to many hundreds of amino acids. The order of those amino acids gives rise to proteins' complex 3D shapes, which in turn determine how they function. Knowing those shapes helps researchers devise drugs that can lodge in protein pockets. And knowing the rules for protein structures could lead to the design and synthesis of unnatural proteins that could be used in medicine and materials science.
In 2003, David Baker created an entirely new protein with computational methods for the first time, using a computer program called Rosetta. “The variety is absolutely mindblowing; it seems that you can construct almost any type of protein now with this technology,” Johan Åqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said at a press conference this morning.
At Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed artificial intelligence (AI) software called AlphaFold that could predict a protein’s structure given only its amino acid sequence. This has sped up a process that was previously time-consuming and led to a “complete revolution in structural biochemistry,” Åqvist said. “With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. This is the second Nobel win for AI this year, after pioneers of neural networks won the physics prize yesterday.
David Baker said he was “very excited and very honored” in a call during the press conference. “Our new AI methods are much more powerful than our traditional scientific model methods,” he said. “I’m really excited about all the ways in which protein design can now make the world a better place in health, medicine, and … in technology and sustainability.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/protein-designer-and-structure-solvers-win-chemistry-nobel
