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DeepMind's latest AI breakthrough can accurately predict the way proteins fold – Engadget

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Alphabet-owned DeepMind may be best known for building the AI that beat a world-class Go player, but the company announced another, perhaps more vital breakthrough this morning. As part of its work for the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction, or CASP, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 AI has shown it can guess how certain proteins will fold themselves with surprising accuracy. In some cases, the results were perceived to be “competitive” with actual, experimental data.

“We have been stuck on this one problem – how do proteins fold up – for nearly 50 years,” said Professor John Moult, CASP chair and co-founder, in a DeepMind blog post. “To see DeepMind produce a solution for this, having worked personally on this problem for so long and after so many stops and starts, wondering if we’d ever get there, is a very special moment.”

Researchers and enthusiasts across the internet have met the news enthusiastically, with some proclaiming that AlphaFold has solved the “protein solving problem.” But what does that mean, exactly? And how do we stand to benefit from it?

To start answering these questions, we need to take a closer look at the proteins themselves. As your biology teacher might have said, proteins are the building blocks of life, responsible for countless functions inside and outside the human body. Each one starts as a series of amino acids strung together into a chain, but it doesn’t take long — sometimes just milliseconds  — before things start to get complicated. Some parts of the amino acid chain twist into helixes. Others fold back onto themselves as “sheets”. Before long, these helixes and sheets coalesce and contort into a protein’s final structure, and that’s what gives a protein the ability to perform specific tasks, like ferrying oxygen through your body or strengthening the structure of your bones. 

In other words, shape is everything, and researchers have spent decades trying to find a way to determine a protein’s final, folded structure based solely on the amino acids that make up its backbone. That’s where CASP comes in — since 1994, the program has served as a focal point of sorts for teams around the world working to crack the protein solving problem with computational ingenuity. The rules are fairly simple: Every other year, organizers select a series of target proteins from a bevy of submissions whose structures have been determined experimentally, but haven’t been published yet. Researchers then get a few months to tune their systems and make their predictions, which are then judged by experts in the field for about a month after submissions are closed. 

While CASP has been running for 26 years, it’s been in the past few that the scientific community has been able to bring quantum leaps in compute power and machine learning to bear on the challenge. In DeepMind’s case, that involved training AlphaFold 2’s prediction model on about 170,000 known protein structures, along with a vast number of protein sequences whose 3D structures haven’t yet been determined. This testing data, the team admits, is fairly similar to what it used in 2018, when the original AlphaFold system achieved top marks during CASP 13. (At the time, organizers hailed DeepMind’s “unprecedented progress in the ability of computational methods to predict protein structure.”) 

That said, the team made some notable changes to its machine learning approach — they haven’t published a full paper yet, but the CASP 14 abstract book highlights some of their modifications. And beyond that, DeepMind also relied on about 128 of Google’s cloud-based TPUv3 cores, which ultimately gave AlphaFold 2 the ability to accurately determine a protein’s structure within just days, if not sooner — the New York Times notes that, in some cases, predictions can be generated in a matter of hours. 


DeepMind

This all sounds impressive — and it is, certainly — but there’s still plenty of work to be done. On the whole, AlphaFold’s results represented a dramatic improvement in accuracy compared to past years, and as mentioned, some of DeepMind’s predictions were accurate enough to rival experimental results at an atomic level. Others, however, fell short of that threshold. The company notes that “for the very hardest protein targets, those in the most challenging free-modelling category, AlphaFold achieves a median score of 87.0 GDT” — that’s just shy of the 90 GDT metric CASP co-founder Moult uses as the barrier for calling results “competitive” with real data. Put another way, DeepMind hasn’t fully solved the protein solving problem, but it’s getting closer than many had thought possible. 

As DeepMind’s work continues, we’ll start to see the full extent of accurate protein prediction take shape — for now, the jury still seems out on what practical benefits we could expect to see in the short term. The company points to potential advances in sustainability and drug design as a result of its protein folding research, though it didn’t elaborate on specifics. Meanwhile, Janet Thornton, a structural biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute, told Nature that she hopes this leap in accuracy could shed light on the functions of “thousands” of unsolved proteins at work in the human body. If nothing else, though, researchers could be looking at a glut of new protein structure data to investigate, test against, and work backward from — that’s worth celebrating, even if we don’t know how it’ll be used yet.

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science, ai, machine learning, deep learning, deepmind, alphafold, alphafold 2, protein, protein folding, genomics, news, tomorrow
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The body of a Ugandan Olympic athlete who was set on fire by her partner is received by family

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September 13, 2024

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.

Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.

She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.

Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.

“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.

It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.

Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.

Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.

Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.

“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.

He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.

Kenya’s high rates of violence against women have prompted marches by ordinary citizens in towns and cities this year.

Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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September 11, 2024

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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B.C. sets up a panel on bear deaths, will review conservation officer training

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September 10, 2024

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VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.

Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”

Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.

“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.

B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.

Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.

Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.

Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.

“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”

Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”

“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.

Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.

“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.

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