For over 50 years, molecular biologists from research institutes around the world have focused their studies on protein, considered one of the essential components for life, to explain the mystery of the folding of the protein on itself, for scholars so-called “enigma of life”.
All the studies conducted to date to predict how folding occurs have however employed bioinformatics methods with wide margins of error.
The epochal turning point is instead of our days.
AlphaFold, a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence program developed by DeepMind, a British company linked to Google, has made it possible to model in 3D the folding of a protein with an accuracy of more than 90%.
It is a structured program with connections that simulate the human brain and that exploits a high computing capacity.
As “revolutionary” as the news may seem, it certainly does not surprise Information Technology insiders for at least a couple of reasons.
We know that in recent years the knowledge base available to Research Centers of any scientific and industrial sector has developed with exponential growth thanks to the advent of BIG DATA.
It is known that on this vast base of knowledge, increasingly advanced Artificial Intelligence systems such as Deep Learning, an emerging area of A.I. that, inspired by the structure and function of the mind, tries to emulate the learning process of human beings.
All this, combined with the great computing power available today, allows researchers to set themselves increasingly challenging objectives in terms of results and implementation times, thus opening increasingly promising horizons for all those research activities aimed at increasing the well-being of mankind.