Protein pioneers David Baker, Demis Hassibis and John Jumper share this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry. (Courtesy: Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach)

Pioneers of AI-based protein-structure prediction share 2024 chemistry Nobel prize

by · Physics World

The 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassibis and John Jumper for their work on proteins.

Baker bagged half the prize “for computational protein design” and Hassibis and Jumper share the other half for “for protein structure prediction”.

Baker is a biochemist based at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hassibis did a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London and is CEO and co-founder of UK-based Google DeepMind. Also based at Google DeepMind, Jumper studied physics at Vanderbilt University and the University of Cambridge before doing a PhD in chemistry at the University of Chicago.

Entirely new protein

In 2003, Baker was the first to create an entirely new protein from its constituent amino acids – and his research group has since created many more new proteins. Some of these molecules have found use in sensors, nanomaterials, vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

In 2020, Jumper and Hassibis created AlphaFold2, which is an artificial-intelligence model that can predict the structure of a protein based on its amino-acid sequence. A protein begins as a linear chain of amino acids that folds itself to create a complicated 3D structure.

These structures can be determined  experimentally using techniques including X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance. However this is time-consuming and expensive.

Used by millions

AlphaFold2 was trained using many different protein structures and went on to successfully predict the structures of nearly all of the 200,000 known proteins. It has been used by millions of people around the world and could boost our understanding of a wide range of biological and chemical processes including bacterial resistance to antibiotics and the decomposition of plastics.

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