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MACHINE LEARNING

Fast track to structural biology

Nature Chemistry volume 13, pages 1032–1034 (2021)Cite this article

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Machine learning algorithms are fast surpassing human abilities in multiple tasks, from image recognition to medical diagnostics. Now, machine learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of accurately predicting the folded structures of proteins.

In 1997, an IBM computer called Deep Blue won a game of chess against Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion at that time. Deep Blue was a specialized computer, built by IBM for this purpose and mostly relied on brute force computing power, by evaluating 200 million positions per second. In the following almost 25 years, the advent of modern machine learning has produced several milestones in competitions of the ‘man against the machine’ kind. In 2015 the company DeepMind reported that the program AlphaGo was able to defeat several masters at the game of Go. This fact made a news splash as, besides the intricacies of the game itself, AlphaGo is not a specialized machine but a computer program that can be run on relatively standard hardware. Since then, there has been a rapid succession of additional programs able to outperform humans in different tasks, from complex games to medical diagnostics.

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Fig. 1: AlphaFold2 prediction of protein structures in three different cases.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, The Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Cecilia Clementi

  2. Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Department of Chemistry, Department of Physics, and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Cecilia Clementi

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  1. Cecilia Clementi
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Correspondence to Cecilia Clementi.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Clementi, C. Fast track to structural biology. Nat. Chem. 13, 1032–1034 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-021-00814-y

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