AlphaFold, which contributed to a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, solved which longstanding scientific problem?
- Designing synthetic DNA sequences that replicate autonomously
- Mapping the complete human genome from scratch
- Creating stable metallic hydrogen under room-temperature conditions
- Predicting protein 3D structure from amino acid sequence
Answer: Predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence (the protein folding problem)
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind developed AlphaFold, which in 2020 solved the protein folding problem — predicting how a protein's amino acid sequence folds into its specific 3D shape. This 50-year-old challenge had been tested in the CASP competition since 1994. AlphaFold 2 achieved experimental-grade accuracy at CASP14 and later deposited structures for over 200 million proteins in a public database.