Google’s DeepMind is leveraging its artificial intelligence systems to figure out protein’s structure properties of the novel coronavirus. Researchers have been developing computational methods to predict protein structure from the amino acid sequence. AlphaFold, the deep learning system developed by DeepMind focuses on predicting protein structure accurately when no structures of similar proteins are available, called “free modelling”. These predictions haven’t been experimentally verified, DeepMind says, but they may help scientists understand how the coronavirus functions. This, in turn, may be of use when developing a vaccine or cure. As per the company’s website “Normally we’d wait to publish this work until it had been peer-reviewed for an academic journal. However, given the potential seriousness and time-sensitivity of the situation, we’re releasing the predicted structures as we have them now, under an open license so that anyone can make use of them. ”
Further details are on DeepMind.com
