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New AI Tools Predict How Life's Building Blocks Assemble

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.

In a paper published today in Nature, Google DeepMind and its spinoff company Isomorphic Labs announced the latest iteration of their AlphaFold program, AlphaFold3, which can predict the structures of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands and other biomolecules, either alone or bound together in different embraces. Most notably, the biochemist David Baker and his team at the University of Washington in 2021 developed a competing algorithm called RoseTTAFold, which like AlphaFold2 predicts protein structures from sequence data. But if the history of protein-structure AI can predict the future, then these next-generation deep learning models will continue to help scientists reveal the complex interactions that make life happen.

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