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

The two lines of research recognized with this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry are clearly disruptive. A protein’s function depends on its structure, and this, in turn, depends on the sequence. While sequences can be easily read, determining structures requires a great deal of effort. The transition from an amino acid sequence to a three-dimensional structure in the cell fundamentally depends on the laws of physics, which are known but involve millions of interactions and possibilities.

For decades, we believed we could eventually reconstruct how an amino acid chain folds by following these laws, but all attempts fell short. Hassabis and Jumper took a shortcut, using artificial intelligence models trained on databases of structures already determined by crystallography. Although this method is essentially a black box that doesn’t explain the folding process, it is capable of accurately predicting structures solely from sequences.

AlphaFold is now an indispensable tool in biological research, where it has already opened up new horizons. On the other hand, Baker has demonstrated the power of designing folds that don’t exist in nature using the same building blocks that nature uses. Ultimately, he has opened the door to a new chemistry inspired by nature, with the ability to generate synthetic proteins with interesting properties.