Oxford Martin School series — “Protein structure & AI: the excitement about the recent advance made by Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold
Held in response to the 30th Nov annoucnement form DeepMind of AlphaFold’s breakthrough solvign of the protein solving problem. Held partly in direct response to emailed requests received from fans of OMS who’d seen the prior episodes in the series and wondered whether the team might discuss this latest develpoment. A rare chance to hear direct immediate reaction from figures at the cutting edge of their respective fields, to “live” research.
- Yvonne Jones FRS FMedSci, professor of protein crystallography at Oxford, co-founder (along with Dave Stuart) and currently co-head of the Division of Structural Biology. Interested in the receptors that sit on cell surfaces and the signals to proteins that bind to them; especially in the nervous system and immune system. Crystallography the key one of several techniques used to solve the structures.
- Prof Phil Biggin professor of computational biochemitry in departmet of biochemistry. His lab uses mainly computed models not so much to solve the structures but to infer things about the structures.
- (Chaired by) Prof Prof Charles Godfray.
Proteins being essentially the “messengers” between our cells, encoded by the “beads on a string” that is amino acids & polypeptides together comprising 3-dimenstional structures such as DNA. A “shoelace” that gets tied up like “molecular origami”. Theyh are too small to resolve using light microscopy, which is why we pass X-rays (a much smaller wavelength) through a well-aligned set of molecules (i.e. in a well-formed crystal). It’s a problem that is enjoys a blend of massive complexity and relatively communicable concept, and has seen many a Nobel Prize awarded (starting with Dorothy Hodgkin’s in 1964).
Watch the original here.
