3 get chemistry Nobel for protein design and structure prediction

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three scientists for their breakthrough work predicting and even designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. The prize was awarded to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honoured research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.

“That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.

“The number of designs that they have produced and published, and the variety, is absolutely mind blowing. It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” said Professor Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee. “Proteins are the molecules that enable life. Proteins are building blocks that form bones, skin, hair and tissue... to understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins.” — AP

Created new protein, AI model

• 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
• Hassabis and Jumper created an AI model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified