These stories run the gamut from rose-coloured positivity, to predictions of market upheaval and existential threat. If you have played with ChatGPT, you’ve probably experienced something in between — a mixed bag of time saving and inability to do primary school mathematics.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry marks an unambiguously positive impact of AI, celebrating achievements that reshape our understanding of biology and open new frontiers in medicine, agriculture and biotechnology.
Proteins are the building blocks of cells, and they carry out all manner of biological reactions with efficiency human chemists cannot replicate. Examples include keratin that makes up your hair and haemoglobin that carries oxygen from your lungs to your cells.
Each protein is built up from a sequence of amino acids, which folds into a defined three-dimensional structure that allows it to function. For more than 50 years scientists have grappled with how a specific sequence leads to a given protein structure — with many devoting whole careers to deciphering protein structure.
This year, one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their development of AlphaFold2, an AI tool that predicts protein structures with stunning accuracy.
The second half of the prize rewards solutions to the opposite problem — recognising Prof David Baker’s work in designing protein sequences that fold into novel structures with defined functions. These awards highlight how cutting-edge computational tools are revolutionising biology and offering profound benefits to humanity.
AlphaFold2, developed by DeepMind in 2021 and led by Hassabis and Jumper, is trained on a massive catalogue of publicly available protein structures that helped it essentially solve the 50-year-old problem.
While Baker and his group have created a software suite that can be used to design brand new proteins with novel functions, this means instead of evolving new functions to tackle a given problem, a protein with the desired activity can be created de novo. Together, the 2024 Nobel Laureates in chemistry have allowed the prediction of the structure of virtually all proteins catalogued by researchers in all organisms, offering insights into how they function, how they can work together and how they can be designed.
These advances not only accelerate drug discovery and disease research, but also have the potential to play a transformative role in agriculture and biotechnology.
What makes this Nobel Prize so impactful is not only the breakthroughs themselves, but also the accessibility of the results and the speed with which they have transformed research.
The AlphaFold database, which contains over 200 million protein structures, is publicly available and has already been used by millions of researchers worldwide. Meanwhile, the software tools developed by Baker are also publicly available.
This democratisation of scientific tools is accelerating discoveries in numerous fields. As the Nobel Committee acknowledged, the development of AlphaFold is set to have long-lasting benefits for humanity, from combating antibiotic resistance to designing enzymes that can break down plastics.
At the University of Otago, researchers in the biochemistry department are harnessing AlphaFold2 to study proteins critical to agriculture, particularly in crops such as ryegrass.
Understanding how certain proteins function allows scientists to identify key traits, such as drought tolerance or disease resistance, which can be targeted for crop improvement. This has the potential to accelerate breeding programmes aimed at enhancing food security.
With the power of AlphaFold, experiments that previously took years of laborious experimental work can now be fast-tracked.
The applications of AlphaFold extend far beyond agriculture.
In human health, researchers at Otago are using it to gain insights into diseases such as cancer. The ability to visualise protein structures has always been central to developing drugs that interact with proteins in highly specific ways.
Now, with AlphaFold, this process is faster and more accurate. Knowledge of structure for almost every human protein also helps us better understand genetic variation and disease progression, and enables scientists to identify new therapeutic targets, contributing to more effective treatments.
The Nobel recognition of AlphaFold and the ability to design novel proteins underscores the profound potential of AI in biology.
At institutions such as the University of Otago, the technology is already being used to tackle pressing global challenges in both agriculture and human health, and will massively accelerate traditional lab experiments. It is an exciting time to be a biochemistry student, as while these AI tools answer many questions, they are enabling ever more sophisticated questions to be addressed.
This Nobel-winning innovation not only fulfills a scientific dream, but also reminds us that breakthroughs in understanding often come from disruptive technology, paving the way for future discoveries that will shape our world for decades to come.
— Prof Catherine Day, Prof Peter Mace and Dr Adam Middleton work in the department of biochemistry at the University of Otago.
