Chemistry World

The developers of computational tools that can be used to accurately design and predict protein structures have been recognised with this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry. The Nobel committee noted that these tools have led to a revolution in biological chemistry and are today used by millions of researchers around the world.

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper from Google’s DeepMind team received one half of the prize for their work on AlphaFold and AlphaFold2 – programs that dramatically increased the accuracy of protein structure predictions. In 2021, the team released 350,000 structures including those of all 20,000 proteins in the human proteome. In 2022 they provided the structures of a further 200 million proteins – almost every protein known to science.