Structural bioinformatics
Over a year of AlphaFold 2 free to use and of the revolution it triggered in biology
Confident modeling of protein structures, prediction of their interactions with other biomolecules, and even protein design are now at everybody’s reach thanks to the revolution started by Deepmind.
Introduction | Democratizing the use of AlphaFold 2 and new adaptations of it | What’s next | Protein language models | Pre-made databases of structural models built with these modern tools | Unexpected things that AlphaFold 2 seems to be able to do | Further reads on the topic and on broader structural biology
Introduction
It all started when a private company played for the first time ever in a contest for protein structure prediction, and won it. Twice in a row, and it then released its star program in an open form for all scientists (also students, actually everybody!) to use for free. Moreover, its users don’t even need a powerful computer, because the calculation happens right on a GPU in the cloud!
We are talking about Deepmind, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company of the Alphabet group, owner of the most…
