Wed Oct 09 11:30:54 UTC 2024: ## Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for Protein Structure Revolution

**Stockholm, Sweden** – David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their groundbreaking work on predicting protein structures and designing new proteins.

The Nobel Committee cited the trio’s contributions to understanding the fundamental building blocks of life. Hassabis and Jumper, researchers at Google DeepMind, developed the revolutionary artificial intelligence program AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of proteins with unprecedented accuracy. Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, was recognized for his pioneering work in designing new proteins with specific functions.

Proteins are vital to all living organisms, playing crucial roles in everything from muscle function and DNA replication to immune responses. Understanding their structure is critical for developing new drugs and therapies.

“For several decades, predicting the shape of proteins from their sequence was considered impossible,” explained Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. AlphaFold, however, has changed the game. The AI system, unveiled in 2020, can predict the structure of two-thirds of proteins with more than 90% accuracy.

“It was an enormous breakthrough,” said Johan Åqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee. “This is a fantastic resource for chemical and biological research.”

Baker, on the other hand, has been working on the opposite problem: designing proteins with desired structures. His software, Rosetta, has enabled researchers to create proteins with previously unimaginable properties. These new proteins have potential applications in medicine, materials science, and beyond.

“David Baker opened up a completely new world of proteins that we had never seen before,” said Åqvist. “It’s a mind-blowing development.”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is the third awarded so far this year, following the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNAs.

Read More