ALPHA FOLD

1. About

• AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Alphabet's/Google's DeepMind which performs predictions of protein structure.
• The program is designed as a deep learning system.
• AlphaFold is an AI-based protein structure prediction tool. 
• It used processes based on “training, learning, retraining and relearning” to predict the structures of the entire 214 million unique protein sequences deposited in the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) database.
• Hence in General AlphaFold is an advanced modelling program that can predict the precise 3D atomic structures of proteins and some molecular complexes.

2. Significance of Protein

• Proteins are at the centre of life itself. 

• Proteins are the building blocks of life, they underpin every biological process in every living thing. 
• And, because a protein’s shape is closely linked with its function, knowing a protein’s structure unlocks a greater understanding of what it does and how it works.
• This groundbreaking resource would help accelerate scientific research and discovery globally.
• Proteins play many roles in the biological world. 
• They transport nutrients, trigger chemical reactions, and build the structures that make up all living things. 
• To fully understand what a protein does, scientists need to know its 3D structure, and this is no easy task.

3. Why to study the Protein Structure

• Proteins are involved in basically every important activity that happens inside every living thing, yourself included: digesting food, enabling muscles to contract, moving oxygen throughout the body, and attacking foreign viruses and bacteria. Our hormones are made out of proteins; so is Our hair.
• To put it simply, proteins are so important because they are so versatile. Proteins can undertake a vast array of different structures and functions, far more than other types of biomolecules (e.g., lipids or carbohydrates). 
• This incredible versatility is a direct consequence of how proteins are built.
• Every protein is composed of a string of building blocks known as amino acids linked together in a particular order. There are 20 different types of amino acids. In one sense, then, protein structure is elegantly simple: each protein is defined by its one-dimensional sequence of amino acids, with 20 different amino acids to choose from. Proteins can range from a few dozen to several thousand amino acids in length.
• But proteins do not stay one-dimensional. To become functional, they first fold into complex three-dimensional shapes.
• A protein’s shape relates closely to its function. To take one example, antibody proteins fold into shapes that enable them to precisely identify and target particular foreign bodies, like a key fitting into a lock. Understanding the shape that proteins will fold into is thus essential to understanding how organisms function, and ultimately how life itself works.

4. Significance of AlphaFold on Society

• When it comes to commercial opportunity and startup activity, there are two applications in particular for which AlphaFold attracts a lot of attention: drug discovery and protein design
• In a nutshell, designing a new drug entails identifying a compound in the body—most often a protein—that you want to target, and then finding a molecule (the drug) that will successfully bind to that target, producing some beneficial health outcome. Knowing the three-dimensional shape of a prospective protein target is essential to this process because a protein’s shape defines which and how other molecules will bind to it. AlphaFold makes available a vast new set of drug target candidates to explore.
• One area of drug discovery for which AlphaFold holds particular promise is neglected diseases. Neglected diseases are those for which little research funding is directed to develop treatments, often because the disease affects very few people or because the populations that it affects are low-income and thus represent a less compelling market opportunity.
• AlphaFold helps level the playing field in the search for therapeutics for these disease states by, for the first time, making relevant protein structures instantly available without the need for costly laboratory work.
• Protein researchers and entrepreneurs seem even more excited about AlphaFold’s potential to boost the burgeoning field of de novo protein design.

5. How alpha fold can impact the field of Biology

• Proteins are the business ends of biology, meaning proteins carry out all the functions inside a living cell. 
• Therefore, knowing protein structure and function is essential to understanding human diseases. 
• Scientists predict protein structures using x-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or cryogenic electron microscopy. 
• These techniques are not just time-consuming, they often take years and are based mainly on trial-and-error methods. 
• The development of AlphaFold changes all of that.
• It is a watershed movement in science and structural biology in particular.
• AlphaFold has already helped hundreds of scientists accelerate their discoveries in vaccine and drug development since the first public release of the database nearly a year back.

6. Implication of AlphaFold innovation in India

• India is no stranger to the field and has produced some fine structural biologists. 
• The Indian community of structural biology is strong and skilled. 
• It needs to quickly take advantage of the AlphaFold database and learn how to use the structures to design better vaccines and drugs. 
• Understanding the accurate structures of COVID-19 virus proteins in days rather than years will accelerate vaccine and drug development against the virus.
• India will also need to speed up its implementation of public-private partnerships in the sciences.
• India could facilitate collaborations with the prevalent hardware muscle and data science talent in the private sector and specialists in academic institutions to pave the way for data science innovations.

7. Conclusion

• At the same time, AlphaFold is no silver bullet for real-world challenges like drug discovery. Figuring out the most viable and impactful ways to translate AlphaFold’s fundamental insights into products that create value in the real world will entail years of hard work from researchers and entrepreneurs. But make no mistake: the long-term impact will be transformative.