“Answer” to a scientific problem that remained unsolved for 50 years – Protein and artificial intelligence

For almost 50 years, scientists have struggled to solve one of nature’s most difficult problems: to predict the complex three-dimensional shape in which amino acids will fold when they form a functional protein. In 2021, for the first time, scientists showed that an artificial intelligence system could finally achieve this goal and predict the exact structures of proteins and even do it en masse for thousands of proteins. That’s why the leading science “Science” announced – as it does every year – that this was the most important scientific achievement of this year.

According to the magazine, this is an achievement on two “fronts”: on the one hand a scientific problem has been solved that remained unsolved for five decades and, on the other hand, scientists now have in their hands “an innovative technique that, like CRISPR and cryo-EM, will greatly accelerate scientific discoveries. “

Proteins are the cornerstones of life and their functions, which play a central role in almost all biological processes, are directly related to their exact three-dimensional shape. Until recently, the determination of this protein structure was a time consuming and costly process, requiring complex laboratory analyzes.

Although many attempts have been made for decades to develop computational models to solve the problem of protein folding, the exact prediction of their structure escaped researchers, until 2021 two important studies appeared simultaneously in the two most important scientific journals in the world, in in “Nature” and “Science”, where two different “smart” systems were introduced, the AlphaFold and RoseTTA-fold respectively. Both are capable of predicting a wide range of complex protein structures quickly and accurately, based on just the amino acids they contain. Researchers from both scientific teams have even allowed free access to their data, so that other scientists can take advantage of the new “smart” systems.

The other scientific developments that stood out in 2021 and complete the top ten (Top 10), according to “Science”, were the development of antiviral pills against Covid-19, the new measurements of the subatomic muon particle, the observations of earthquakes on Mars from NASA’s InSight rover, the recovery of ancient human DNA from the ground, the application of the CRISPR genetic technique to living organisms, the use of psychedelic drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, the development of monoclonal antibodies to infectious diseases, the new paleontological discoveries about man’s distant past and advances in fusion energy production.

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