AIster · Prologue · Breakthroughs
AlphaFold 2 cracks protein structure prediction
AI solved a 50-year-old biology problem, showing it could speed up real science
Key facts
- Date
- 30 Nov 2020
- Era
- Prologue
- Interest
- Breakthroughs
- Threads
- Model wars, Labs & people
- Who
- DeepMind
- Where
- CASP14 assessment
- Score
- Median 92.4 GDT
- Trained on
- About 170,000 known protein structures
Predicting a protein's 3D shape from its sequence had been a grand challenge in biology for five decades. DeepMind announced that AlphaFold had reached a median score of 92.4 on the Global Distance Test (a measure of how closely a predicted shape matches the real one) at the CASP14 assessment, a competition for protein structure prediction. That was above the roughly 90 considered competitive with laboratory methods.
Sources
- Google DeepMind, AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, 2020-11-30