EXCERPT

DeepMind's AlphaFold is an AI system built to tackle this long-standing challenge. In 2018, the initial version of AlphaFold debuted at CASP (Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction), a biennial worldwide event for experimenting with state-of-the-art protein structuring technologies. AlphaFold achieved the highest accuracy of the participating technologies at CASP13 in 2018, but has now been developed further into what is being labeled a "stunning advance."

The system was trained on publicly available data on around 170,000 protein structures and a large database of unknown protein structures ahead of its appearance at CASP14 this week. Technologies are graded from 0-100 for accuracy on what is known as the Global Distance test, which assesses what percentage of beads in the protein chain are within a threshold distance of the correct location. In results released today, AlphaFold scored 92.4 across all targets.