Hyderabad: Google DeepMind, the central artificial intelligence lab of Google, on Wednesday unveiled AlphaFold 3, a new and updated Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that predicts not only the structure of proteins but the structure of "all life's molecules."
The results generated by AlphaFold 3 will be vital for researchers in medicine, agronomy, materials science, and drug development to test discoveries, the company said.
"It’s a big milestone for us. Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3.
Previous versions of AlphaFold only predicted the structures of proteins. AlphaFold 3 goes beyond that and can model DNA, RNA, and smaller molecules called ligands, expanding the model’s capability for scientific use.
How will AlphaFold 3 Function?
Given an input list of molecules, AlphaFold 3 generates their joint 3D structure, revealing how they all fit together. It models large biomolecules such as proteins, DNA, and RNA, as well as small molecules, also known as ligands — a category encompassing many drugs. AlphaFold 3 can model chemical modifications to these molecules which control the healthy functioning of cells, that when disrupted can lead to disease.
AlphaFold 3’s capabilities come from its next-generation architecture and training that now covers all of life’s molecules. At the core of the model is an improved version of our Evoformer module — a deep learning architecture that underpinned AlphaFold 2’s incredible performance. After processing the inputs, AlphaFold 3 assembles its predictions using a diffusion network, akin to those found in AI image generators. The diffusion process starts with a cloud of atoms, and over many steps converges on its final, most accurate molecular structure.
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