As a measure of how vastly information technology, computational methods, big data, and machine learning are transforming research practice, I invite readers to consider the following amazing achievement. DeepMinds, an AI-focused subsidiary of Google (Alphabet), has been developing an extremely accurate program to predict protein folding configurations, a notoriously difficult computational problem. Today they released a database that essentially captured their predictions for almost all known human proteins (about 350,000 of them) plus similar data for a number of other highly studied reference organisms such as the e. coli bacterium. The database, as I understand it, is fully public access, which is wonderful.

This is a major game changer and the implications are hard to fully predict, but I expect they will be striking. They summarized this work in a paper (preprint) in Nature. See

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03828-1

I expect there will be a flurry of media coverage over the next few days. Here are a couple of good early pieces to provide some context:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/22/deepmind-puts-the-entire-human-proteome-online-as-folded-by-alphafold/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/google-turns-alphafold-loose-on-the-entire-human-genome/

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI