The winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2024 are David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA; and Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper, both from Google DeepMind, London, UK, the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday, October 9.
While Baker received the award for computational protein design; Hassabis and Jumper got it for protein structure prediction.
Proteins form the very basis of life – life cannot exist without them.
Proteins also function as the very building blocks of different tissues, hormones, signal substances and antibodies.
Understanding how proteins work is therefore crucial to understanding the complex functioning of the human body and everything that sustains it.
“Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures,” the Academy said in a statement, adding, that “these discoveries hold enormous potential.”
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry said, “One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities.”
Baker’s work is significant as in 2003 he designed a new protein unlike any other. Proteins consist of 20 different amino acids “that can be described as life’s building blocks" and Baker used the blocks to come up with his innovation.
His “research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” the Academy’s statement said.
As amino acids are life blocks, predicting structures of proteins also becomes critical. “In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function.”
Researchers since the '70s have been trying without success to predict protein structures from the amino acid sequences, but in 2020 Hassabis and Jumper came up with an AI model called AlphaFold2.
Through the model they have predicted “the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.”
Since then AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries.
Apart from various scientific applications, researchers can now understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
The discoveries could help find solutions for some of the world's most complex health and environmental problems
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