The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for computational design and structure prediction of proteins. The laureates are David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, the Nobel Committee announced on Wednesday, UNN reports.
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"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: one half to David Baker for 'computational protein design' and the other half to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for 'protein structure prediction,'" the statement reads.
The 2024 Nobel Prize winners Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are said to have used their artificial intelligence model AlphaFold2 to calculate the structure of all human proteins. They also predicted the structure of virtually all 200 million proteins that researchers have discovered while mapping Earth's organisms.
Google DeepMind has also made the AlphaFold2 code publicly available, and anyone can access it. The artificial intelligence model has become a gold mine for researchers. By October 2024, more than two million people from 190 countries had used AlphaFold2.
This year's Chemistry Prize winner, David Baker, reportedly created the first protein that was completely different from all known existing proteins.
The Top7 protein came as a surprise to researchers working on protein design. Those who had previously designed new proteins could only mimic existing structures. The unique structure of Top7 did not exist in nature. In addition, with its 93 amino acids, the protein was larger than anything previously produced using de novo design.