THE BREAKTHROUGH THAT COULD REVOLUTIONISE
BIOLOGY

Proteins are fundamental cogs in the machinery of life. But to understand how a protein works, we need to know how it’s folded up. This is incredibly complicated stuff: there are more possible configurations for an average protein than there are atoms in the known universe.

Scientists spent decades struggling with the ‘protein folding problem’, managing to unravel only a tiny fraction of the potential billions of proteins found in nature.

That was until artificial intelligence got in on the act. Could the AlphaFold model developed by Google’s DeepMind unleash a new era of possibility that will transform science and the world around us?