An AI cracked a 50-year-old biology problem in days
Predicting a protein's 3D shape from its amino acid sequence had stumped biologists for decades, even though that shape determines almost everything the protein does. In 2020, DeepMind's AlphaFold2 predicted structures with accuracy rivaling years of lab work at the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. Its makers then released predicted structures for nearly every known protein as a free public database used by researchers worldwide.