AI-driven protein design earns chemistry #NobelPrize2024

Headline Science

Youtube ID: hRK5v65j17o

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is for computational protein design and structure prediction. David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper took home the prize for their work using artificial intelligence models to revolutionize our understanding of the relationship between amino acid sequence and three-dimensional structure. The tools they’ve developed enable scientists to create entirely new proteins with never-before-seen capabilities.

Video credits are available on YouTube.


Transcript

Imagine trying to predict how this will fold. That’s what it used to be like to predict the shape of proteins. But a breakthrough changed all of that and just won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper took home the prize for their work in computational protein design and structure prediction. If you want to build a protein, you have to know the order of its amino acids; that’s what determines its shape, and the shape determines what it does.

In 2003, Baker’s team drew a protein shape that didn’t exist in nature and predicted its amino acid sequence with a computer program. Then, they created that protein in the lab, and its structure matched their model almost perfectly.

Hassabis and Jumper worked in the other direction, using neural networks to predict shape from sequence. The AI model they created achieved almost 90% accuracy in 2020 — more than double previous models!

Together, the two methods have revolutionized what is possible with protein design, meaning scientists can now create bespoke proteins from scratch to fight diseases, detect drugs or form new materials we haven’t even dreamed of yet.

To embed this video, please visit YouTube and use the Share function.

Related Content