AlphaFold

AlphaFold and its successor AlphaFold2 applied some of the technology originally designed for AlphaGo and applied this to protein folding.

While some of the behaviour of proteins is given by their chemical and molecular structure, the physical shape of a protein, the way it naturally folds given the order of molecular units, is also critical. For example, this folded shape determines which parts of the molecular structure are exposed and which hidden inside and thus the extent to which they are free to interact with other molecules and engage in biological processs. Determining the folded shape from the chemical structure is highly complex, and often relies on experimentally observing the structure using electron microscopy and other methods. AlphaFold revolutionised this field allowing new molecules to be tested for efficacy purely by computer simulation (in silco). This means only a relatively small number need to progress to full lab-based synthesis and testing.

Two of the Google engineers who created AlphaFold2, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, were co-recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.