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...
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