Computational Structural Biology: Winter 2024

Ab Initio Protein Structure Prediction

AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind (London, UK) that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of ab initio protein structure prediction, describe qualitatively how AlphaFold works, and illustrate its successes and its limitations.

ALphaFold: successes