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DeepMind adds a diffusion engine to latest protein-folding software

arstechnica.com
submitted
a year ago
bykaiserseahorsetoscience

Summary

DeepMind's AlphaFold software can predict the structure of proteins. The software was developed by Google's AI division, which released Alpha Fold in 2021. The new version of the software is much more computationally efficient. The original AlphaFolds could only predict some protein-protein interactions.

DeepMind's AlphaFold 3 software can predict the structure of proteins complexed with other molecules. The software can also predict interactions between proteins and antibodies that recognize them. The team found that most hallucinations were labeled as low-confidence predictions, allowing them to be at least identified.

These same sorts of interactions are also key to drug development. If you know what the complex between a protein and signaling molecule looks like, it makes it far easier to develop molecules that disrupt that interaction. You could also potentially test the strength of interactions between potential drugs identified this way and the proteins they target.

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3 Comments

3
joesch
a year ago*
Yes! This is the kind of work AI should be put on, bettering life for everyone not just a corps bottom line
2
theonesource
a year ago
I wonder if fold@home was just a precursor for this with it's distributed processing and power consumption
1
justadev
a year ago
I'm hopeful we'll start to eradicate diseases because of the work AI ends up doing for us