Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Baker, Hassabis and Jumper for computational protein design and structure prediction"

Proteins are made up of small building blocks, called amino acids, which are organized to create a variety of shapes that enable them to perform their functions. Until the advances made by the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipients, there was a dogma that the structure of a protein, and therefore its function, could not be predicted by simply 'reading' its amino acid sequence, in the same way as our genetic code. Biophysical studies were then necessary, such as X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance or electron cryo-microscopy, the latter also awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 for its advances, which did not always come to fruition.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 discoveries and advances are capable of translating that amino acid readout, predicting its structure and, in turn, helping to understand its function, all computationally, and supported by other experimental techniques for validation. The impact of these advances spans all fields of fundamental biology (human, animal or plant), medicine or drug development. These advances, together with recent advances in computation and artificial intelligence, could position society at a moment of progress as important as that experienced during the industrial revolution.