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Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding oftheir function. Through an enormous experimental effort1-4, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined5, but this represents a small fraction ofthe billions of known protein sequences6,7. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence-the structure prediction component ofthe 'protein folding problem'8-has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years9. Despite recent progress10-14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known. We validated an entirely redesigned version of our neural network-based model, AlphaFold, in the challenging 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14)15, demonstrating accuracy competitive with experimental structures in a majority of cases and greatly outperforming other methods. Underpinning the latest version ofAlphaFold is a novel machine learning approach that incorporates physical and biological knowledge about protein structure, leveraging multi-sequence alignments, into the design ofthe deep learning algorithm.
The development of computational methods to predict three-dimensional (3D) protein structures from the protein sequence has proceeded along two complementary paths that focus on either the physical interactions or the evolutionary history. The physical interaction programme heavily integrates our understanding of molecular driving forces into either thermodynamic or kinetic simulation of protein physics16 or statistical approximations thereof17. Although theoretically very appealing, this approach has proved highly challenging for even moderate-sized proteins due to the computational intractability of molecular simulation, the context dependence of protein stability and the difficulty of producing sufficiently accurate models of protein physics. The evolutionary programme has provided an alternative in recent years, in which the constraints on protein structure are derived from bioinformatics analysis of the evolutionary history of proteins, homology to solved structures18,19 and pairwise evolutionary correlations20-24. This bioinformatics approach has benefited greatly from the steady growth of experimental protein structures deposited in the Protein...