Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

ABSTRACT

Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. We provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known. We validated an entirely new machine learning approach, AlphaFold, in the challenging 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14), demonstrating accuracy competitive with experimental structures in a majority of cases. This breakthrough demonstrates the impact AI can have on scientific discovery and its potential to dramatically accelerate progress in fields like drug design and genomics.