The 2024 Nobels were all about artificial intelligence (AI). Pioneers of computer neural networks underlying AI scooped the physics prize , and chemistry went to two scientists who developed the revolutionary AlphaFold protein-structure prediction tool and one who pioneered protein design , a pursuit that has been supercharged by AI . It's easy to marvel at the technical wizardry behind breakthroughs such as AlphaFold . But a lot of that success is thanks to a database of protein structures dreamed up in the 1960s by Helen Berman, a crystallographer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and like-minded scientists. The Protein Data Bank (PDB) now holds the structures of more than 200,000 proteins, freely available to anyone. These data help AlphaFold to predict the structures of proteins from their sequence , and for other AIs to imagine new proteins at the push of a button. Berman tells Nature why she's pleased with the recognition ' chemistry Nobel laureates David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle, and John Jumper at Google DeepMind in London, both credited the PDB ' and how other scientific fields can pave the way for AI breakthroughs with good data....

When she was a child, Mary Ellen Wiltrout PhD '09 didn't want to follow in her mother's footsteps as a K-12 teacher. Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, Wiltrout was studious with an early interest in science ' and ended up pursuing biology as a career. But following her doctorate at MIT, she pivoted toward education after all. Now, as the director of blended and online initiatives and a lecturer with the Department of Biology, she's shaping biology pedagogy at MIT and beyond. To this day, E.C. Whitehead Professor of Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator emeritus Tania Baker considers creating a permanent role for Wiltrout one of the most consequential decisions she made as department head. Since launching the very first MITxBio massive online open course 7.00x (Introduction to Biology ' the Secret of Life) with professor of biology Eric Lander in 2013, Wiltrout's team has worked with MIT Open Learning and biology faculty to build an award-winning repertoire of MITxBio courses....

'It was a molecule that nobody had ever seen before,' says Wiltschko, who runs a company called Osmo, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His team created the compound, called 533, as part of its mission to understand and digitize smell. His goal ' to develop a system that can detect, predict or create odours ' is a tall order, as molecule 533 shows. 'If you looked at the structure, you would never have guessed that it smelled this way.' That's one of the problems with understanding smell: the chemical structure of a molecule tells you almost nothing about its odour. Two chemicals with very similar structures can smell wildly different; and two wildly different chemical structures can produce an almost identical odour. And most smells ' coffee, Camembert, ripe tomatoes ' are mixtures of many tens or hundreds of aroma molecules, intensifying the challenge of understanding how chemistry gives rise to olfactory experience. Another problem is working out how smells relate to each other. With vision, the spectrum is a simple colour palette: red, green, blue and all their swirling intermediates. Sounds have a frequency and a volume, but for smell there are no obvious parameters. Where does an odour identifiable as 'frost' sit in relation to 'sauna'' It's a real challenge to make predictions about smell, says Joel Mainland, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, an independent research institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....

Plasmids (shown here in a coloured transmission electron micrograph with various genes highlighted) are circular DNA structures used in biology laboratories.Credit: Dr Gopal Murti/Science Photo Library Laboratory-made plasmids, a workhorse of modern biology, have problems. Researchers performed a systematic assessment of the circular DNA structures by analysing more than 2,500 plasmids produced in labs and sent to a company that provides services such as packaging the structures inside viruses so they can be used as gene therapies. The team found that nearly half of the plasmids had design flaws, including errors in sequences crucial to expressing a therapeutic gene. The researchers posted their findings to the preprint server bioRxiv last month ahead of peer review1. The study shines a light on 'a lack of knowledge' about how to do proper quality control on plasmids in the lab, says Hiroyuki Nakai, a geneticist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland who was not involved in the work. He was already aware of problems with lab-made plasmids, but was surprised by the frequency of errors uncovered by the study. There are probably many scientific papers that have been published for which the results are not reproducible owing to errors in plasmid design, he adds....