Researchers at Google DeepMind have developed AlphaFold 3, an AI model that can predict the structure of and interactions between biological molecules including proteins, DNA and RNA, and small molecules that could function as drugs.
Google DeepMind will make the model available for non-commercial use through AlphaFold server. The landmark innovation is likely to dramatically accelerate biological research.
The AI system is a descendant of previous AlphaFold models built by Google DeepMind that essentially solved the problem of predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid structure.
Google DeepMind’s first AlphaFold model, announced in 2018, attempted to predict protein structures. AlphaFold 2, released in 2020, significantly improved on the first’s protein structure accuracy predictions.
AlphaFold 3 goes further by predicting the structures of almost all biological molecules and modeling the interactions between those molecules.