The Download: discovering proteins, and Pakistan’s climate crisis - MIT Technology Review

What’s happened?: A new AI tool could help researchers discover previously unknown proteins and design entirely new ones. When harnessed, it could help unlock the development of more efficient vaccines, speed up research into cures for cancer, or lead to completely new materials.
How it works: ProteinMPNN, developed by a group of researchers from the University of Washington, offers scientists a tool that will complement DeepMind’s AlphaFold tool’s ability to predict the shapes of all proteins known to science. ProteinMPNN will help researchers with the inverse problem. If they already have an exact protein structure in mind, it will help them find the amino acid sequence that folds into that shape.
Why it matters: Proteins are fundamental to life, and understanding their shape is vital to working with them. Traditionally researchers engineer proteins by tweaking those that occur in nature, but ProteinMPNN will open an entire new universe of possible proteins for researchers to design from scratch. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
Read more:
+ DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science. And it’s giving the data away for free, which could spur new scientific discoveries. Read the full story.
+ This is the reason Demis Hassabis started DeepMind. AlphaFold has changed how researchers work and set DeepMind on a new course. Read the full story.
“Fingerprints” of climate change are clear in Pakistan’s devastating floods
What we know:...



Read Full Story: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059580/download-discovering-proteins-pakistan-climate-challenge/

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