Its freely available structures have also been integrated into other public datasets like the European Bioinformatics Institute’s Ensembl genome database and UniProt – a protein sequence and functional information resource.Įric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in the US, called AlphaFold ‘the singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AI’. Since then, more than 500,000 researchers from nearly 200 countries have accessed the AlphaFold database to view over 2 million structures. When AlphaFold was launched last year, it had computed just 350,000 protein structures. The singular and momentous advance in life science that demonstrates the power of AIĮric Topol, Scripps Research Institute, US ‘It’s our gift to humanity, and a demonstration of the benefits AI can bring to society, ’ announced DeepMind’s co-founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis on Twitter. The structures have been added to the open source AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, maintained by the EMBL. The structures were produced using DeepMind’s AlphaFold system, which predicts the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences. The artificial intelligence company DeepMind, in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has released the predicted structures for almost every protein known to science – over 200 million structures in total.