The Nobel prize committee announce the chemistry prize winners on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP through Getty Photographs
The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for his or her work on understanding the construction of proteins, which play important roles in all dwelling organisms. Hassabis and Jumper, of Google DeepMind, developed a synthetic intelligence that predicts the construction of proteins. Baker, on the College of Washington in Seattle, has been recognised for his work on designing new proteins.
Proteins are the molecules that make life occur. The entire key equipment of life is manufactured from proteins, from the muscular tissues that energy us and the molecules that learn and replica DNA to the antibodies that shield us from infections.
“To understand life, you first need to understand the shape of proteins,” mentioned Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, at a press convention.
All proteins are manufactured from chains of amino acids, and there are round 20 completely different varieties of those compounds. The form of proteins is set by the sequence of amino acids, however the best way wherein the chains fold up is so advanced that predicting a protein’s construction from its sequence is extraordinarily difficult.
“For several decades, this was considered impossible,” mentioned Linke.
A number of groups have developed numerous computational strategies of predicting protein buildings, however their accuracy was low. Then Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI referred to as AlphaFold.
The primary model of AlphaFold, unveiled in 2018, was an enchancment on different strategies. The second, launched in 2020, was an enormous leap ahead, predicting two-thirds of protein buildings with greater than 90 per cent accuracy.
By 2022, AlphaFold had been used to foretell the construction of virtually all identified proteins, with the outcomes made freely accessible.
“It was an enormous breakthrough,” mentioned Johan Åqvist, a member of the Nobel committee for chemistry. “This is a fantastic resource for chemical and biological research.”
Baker has lengthy been engaged on the alternative downside, that of designing a protein with a desired construction. The probabilities listed below are limitless – new proteins might be used to do just about something, from treating ailments to creating advanced nanomachines.
“David Baker opened up a completely new world of proteins that we had never seen before,” mentioned Åqvist. “It’s a mind-blowing development.”
Baker has created software program referred to as Rosetta for doing this, which can be freely accessible. He and his group first demonstrated that Rosetta labored again in 2003, after they designed a protein, made it after which used a way referred to as X-ray crystallography to point out it had the designed construction.
Whereas Åqvist described this 2003 work as “the big breakthrough”, the protein created was small, easy and didn’t do something.
Baker himself described the method as extra gradual. “It really happened over many years,” he mentioned. “Over the last 20 years, we’ve been able to design proteins with more and more complex and powerful functions.”
“As we got better and better at that, the scope of applications became more and more exciting,” mentioned Baker. “It’s been this huge opening up of possibilities, because the proteins in nature do so many different things. They mediate all the processes in our bodies and in all living things.”
Baker additionally gave credit score to his colleagues: “I stood on the shoulders of giants. I have had, throughout my career, absolutely wonderful colleagues to work with.”
The award got here as a shock, regardless of hypothesis that he would possibly get it, he mentioned. “It’s turning out to be a unique, special day.”
The chemistry prize is the third Nobel awarded thus far this 12 months. On 8 October, the 2024 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for his or her work on synthetic neural networks. On 7 October, the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medication went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for his or her discovery that tiny items of RNA referred to as microRNAs play a key function in controlling genes.
Final 12 months’s Nobel prize in chemistry went to 3 of the builders of quantum dots – particles so small that their electrical and optical properties are influenced by quantum physics.
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