The London-based company DeepMind released an open-source version of its deep-learning neural network AlphaFold 2 and described its approach in a paper in Nature. Meanwhile, an academic team has developed its own protein-prediction tool inspired by AlphaFold 2. That system, called RoseTTaFold, performs nearly as well as AlphaFold 2, and is described in a Science paper.
DeepMind sent shock waves through the scientific world last year, when it showed that its software could accurately predict the structure of many proteins using the sequence of the proteins alone. Researchers had been working on this challenge for decades, and AlphaFold 2 performed so well that “in some sense the problem is solved”.
Editorial note: The more practical AI gets, the better. And the faster it gets with PANN.