DeepMind breakthrough helps to solve how diseases invade cells

A transmission electron microscopic image that shows SARS-CoV-2-also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes Covid-19, emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. Different folds in a protein determine how it will interact with other molecules, and understanding them has implications for discovering how new diseases like Covid-19 invade our cells, designing enzymes to break down pollutants and improving crop yields. — National Institutes of Health/AFP

Google’s artificial intelligence unit took a giant step to predict the structure of proteins, potentially decoding a problem that has been described as akin to mapping the genome.

DeepMind Technologies Ltd’s AlphaFold reached the threshold for “solving” the problem at the latest Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction competition. The event started in 1994 and is held every two years to accelerate research on the topic.