Abstract:
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has celebrated the use of Artificial Intelligence methods to solve fundamental problems in Structural Biology. On one hand, the problem of predicting protein structures has eluded researchers since Anfinsen’s 1973 postulate that all the information required to determine a protein's three-dimensional structure is contained in its amino acid sequence. On the other hand, the inverse problem of protein design -finding an amino acid sequence that folds into a desired protein structure- has seen remarkable progress since the first experiments in the late '90s. What once seemed like a daunting feat has evolved into a mature technology with countless applications in healthcare and biotechnology. In this talk, we will explore the importance of solving these two challenges for advancing scientific discovery and examine how profoundly AI has shaped these remarkable breakthroughs.