Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Getty Images) Have you ever had an otherwise perfect photo ruined by someone who moved too quickly and caused a blur? Scientists have the same issue while recording images of proteins that change their structure in response to light. This process is common in nature, so for years researchers have tried […]
Enlarge (credit: Humphreys et. al.) It is now relatively trivial to determine the order of amino acids in a protein. Figuring out how that order translates to a complicated three-dimensional structure that performs a specific function, however, is extremely challenging. But after decades of slow progress, Google’s DeepMind AI group announced that it has made tremendous […]
Enlarge (credit: Sloan-Kettering) Just one week after Google’s DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure—a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In […]
Enlarge (credit: University of Washington ) Thanks to the development of DNA-sequencing technology, it has become trivial to obtain the sequence of bases that encode a protein and translate that to the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. But from there, we often end up stuck. The actual function of the protein […]
Expand / Proteins quickly form complex constructions that had proven tough to forecast. (charge: Argonne National Lab) Now, DeepMind declared it had apparently solved one of Science’s exceptional difficulties: the series of amino acids within a protein folds into a three-dimensional form that allows their intricate functions. It is a computational challenge which has resisted […]