Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Scientists comment on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry being awarded for computational protein design and protein structure prediction.
Prof Ewan Birney, Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL-EBI, said:
“Huge congratulations to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and the teams that supported them for this fantastic honour. Tools such as AlphaFold help us understand protein structure, helping us decode how life works; being able to design proteins to our own needs shows how deep our understanding has reached. Such tools are built on decades of experimental work and made possible thanks to a culture inside molecular biology of openly sharing data worldwide. There is a vast treasure trove of public data available in databases such as the ones managed by EMBL. We hope to see these data informing yet more discoveries. The potential of big data alongside AI and technology developments is limitless – and this is the start.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/press-chemistryprize2024.pdf
Declared interests
Prof Ewan Birney “is the Deputy Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), which hosts the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. He is also a Non-Executive Director at Genomics England. EMBL-EBI collaborated with Google DeepMind to develop and disseminate the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, making AlphaFold’s predictions freely and openly accessible to the scientific community.”