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- Ελληνικά
2021 may have been another year dominated by coronavirus, but on a scientific level things seem to be different, as according to the journal "Science" the greatest scientific achievement is related to another issue.
For nearly 50 years, scientists have struggled to solve one of the most difficult problems in nature: predicting the complex three-dimensional shape that amino acids will fold into when they form a functional protein.
In 2021, for the first time, scientists showed that an artificial intelligence system can, at last, achieve this goal and predict the exact structures of proteins and, indeed, do so en masse for thousands of proteins. That's why Science named it the most important scientific achievement of the year.
Achievement on two fronts
According to the journal, whose analysis is republished by healthstories.gr, it is a feat on two fronts: on the one hand, a scientific problem that has remained unsolved for five decades has been solved and, on the other hand, scientists now have "an innovative technique that, like CRISPR and cryo-EM, will greatly accelerate scientific discoveries".
Proteins are the cornerstones of life and their functions, which play a central role in almost all biological processes, are directly related to their precise three-dimensional shape. Until recently, determining this protein structure was a time-consuming and expensive process, requiring complex laboratory analyses.
Although many attempts had been made for decades to develop computational models to solve the problem of protein folding, accurate prediction of protein structure eluded researchers until 2021, when two important studies appeared simultaneously in two of the world's most important scientific journals, Nature and Science, where two different "smart" systems, AlphaFold and RoseTTA-fold, were presented respectively.
Both are capable of predicting a wide range of complex protein structures quickly and accurately, based only on the amino acids they contain.
Researchers from both scientific teams even allowed free access to their data so that other scientists can make use of the new "smart" systems.
Πηγή: newsbeast.gr
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