AlphaFold 2 and the Protein Folding Problem

Speaker(s): Ashwin Sreevatsa
Topic: AlphaFold 2

The protein folding problem is one of the central challenges of biology over the past 50 years. The challenge is to identify the 3D structure of a protein given its amino acid sequence. Recently, DeepMind released a deep learning model called AlphaFold 2 that outperformed the state-of-the-art computational methods and predicted the 3D structures of proteins so accurately that many in the field now consider protein folding to be ‘solved’. This talk discussed a brief history of the protein folding problem, the architecture behind AlphaFold 2, and the next steps for protein folding and computational biology as a whole.

Supplemental Resources

AlphaFold 2 Paper in Nature
AlphaFold 2 Source Code on Github
DeepMind blog post on the initial AlphaFold
DeepMind blog post on AlphaFold 2
Video: AlphaFold and the Grand Challenge to solve protein folding by Arxiv Insights
AlphaFold 2 Example on Google Colab