Google’s DeepMind project has added another feat in its name. The AI program, AlphaFold has been able to predict the 3D shapes of proteins, which is the fundamental unit of any life.
Researchers have found it hard to understand protein folding and it is not easy to stimulate it in even supercomputers because of high computation demands. Now, AI has the potential to aid researchers and scientist to study proteins in details and get few steps to understand and find a cure for diseases like diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer.
DeepMind trained their AI programme which is a neural network on thousands of proteins until it could predict 3D structure from amino acids. Afterwards, when the program was provided with the input, it used the neural network to predict the distances between pairs of amino acids and angles between chemical bonds that connect them.
This new ability of AI will open doors to new research opportunities in medical science and help us understand the fundamental unit of life which has been an arcane subject for long time.
AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery
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