Why in the News?

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors David Baker for computational protein design and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for protein structure prediction. Their pioneering work in protein science has revolutionized understanding and design of proteins, advancing fields from medicine to biotechnology. The award honoured research that connected the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein and the protein’s structure.

David Baker - Computational Protein Design

• Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body.
• They are made up of smaller units called amino acids, which are linked together in long chains.
• In 2003, he successfully designed a new protein from scratch.
• He developed Rosetta, a widely used computational platform to predict and design protein structures and interactions.

Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper - Protein Structure Prediction

• They created AlphaFold 2, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system capable of accurately predicting the 3D structures of proteins based on their amino acid sequences.
• A part of Google's DeepMind project, that was able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
• They utilized advanced machine learning techniques to train AlphaFold on vast amounts of protein data, vastly improving accuracy over previous methods.

Demis Hassabis (Left), John M. Jumper (Center) and David Baker (Right)