In late 2020, Alphabet’s DeepMind division unveiled its new protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, helping to solve a scientific dilemma that had puzzled researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta launch, half a million scientists around the world have accessed the results of the AI system and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it will further increase that access by radically expanding its publicly available AlphaFold protein structure database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million entries.
Alphabet partnered with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) for this venture, which covers proteins from all kingdoms of life: animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and others. The results can be viewed on the UniProt, Ensembl and OpenTargets websites or downloaded individually via GitHub, “for the human proteome and for the proteomes of 47 other key organisms important in research and global health,” according to the AlphaFold website.
“AlphaFold is the singular and momentous breakthrough in the life sciences that demonstrates the power of AI,” Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in a press release Thursday. “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, now it takes seconds. AlphaFold has already accelerated and enabled massive discoveries, including cracking the structure of the nuclear pore complex. And with this new incorporation of structures that illuminate almost the entire protein universe, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved every day.”
AlphaFold has been harnessed in a variety of applications, from advancing research into leprosy and Chagas disease to bee conservation and fighting plastic pollution. DeepMind has also developed AIs that can outperform the best human players, dominate games without even knowing the rules, and even improve traffic patterns. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman left the company in January to launch a new venture, Inflection.AI, with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, shortly before a former employee accused the company of ongoing sexual harassment .