Eleven days of the Nobel Prize in chemistry: Editorial by Alfred F. Ambros and I. G. Ruvkun
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. On the anniversary of the death of the inventor, the Laureates are invited to receive their awards.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. The physics prize was won by two of the founding fathers of machine learning.
Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.
Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.
Hassabis is the co-founding and CEO of DeepMind, as well as the head of the AlphaFold team. The network uses similar structures from databases of hundreds of thousands of structures and millions of sequences from relatedProteins, which hold information about their shapes
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists today — two of whom are significant figures at Google DeepMind — for their work around proteins, which the Nobel Prize committee describes as the “chemical tools of life.”
It’s appropriate for our work to be nominated for the prize for computer science, according to an interview with The New York Times. There is not a single one. It was a hint when he was applauded for his comment by the Times.
The 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemical Chemistry: Predicting Protein Structure Using AlphaFold2 and its Application to Micromolecular Biophysics
The scientific applications for AlphaFold2 include helping researchers to understand antibiotic resistance, according to the Nobel committee. The work that once took years now takes just a few minutes thanks to this year’s chemistry Laureates.
Prior to AlphaFold’s recent dominance, Baker’s team applied the method of predictingProtein structure to designing novelmolecules such as self-assembling proteins and enzymes.
For a long time, it was thought to be impossible to predict the three-dimensional structure of a particle using the information they have about its own amino acid sequence. This year’s laureates “have cracked the code”, he added. The winners will get 11 million Swedish kronor (US$ 1 million) in prize money.
One pioneering team used the tool, along with experimental data, to map the nuclear pore complex, one of our cells’ largest machines that transports molecules into and out of the nucleus. Last year, two teams mined the entire AlphaFold Database to uncover the darkest corners of the protein universe, identifying new families of proteins and folds and surprising connections in the machinery of life.
Scientists say that computational tools like AlphaFold aren’t a replacement for experimental studies. “This is going to empower a new generation of molecular biologists to ask more advanced questions,” CASP judge Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, told Nature in 2020.