Researchers are using AI to decode the human genome

For decades, scientists had struggled to understand how strings of molecular building blocks fold into the complex, three-dimensional structures of proteins. — Photo by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Unsplash

In 2024, two scientists from Google DeepMind shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for an artificial-intelligence program called AlphaFold2.

For decades, scientists had struggled to understand how strings of molecular building blocks fold into the complex, three-dimensional structures of proteins. Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and their colleagues at Google DeepMind trained a program to predict the shapes; when AlphaFold2 was introduced in 2020, it performed so well at this task that scientists around the world adopted it.