Dear colleagues and friends,
I would like to share some exciting news that has been announced today.
EMBL-EBI and DeepMind have co-developed the AlphaFold Protein Structure
Database (AlphaFold DB; https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk), a joint project to
openly and freely share millions of AlphaFold protein-structure predictions
with the scientific community. The database launched officially at 4 pm UK
time on 22 July. Today’s release contains approximately 365,000 structures
(covering over 20 reference proteomes), which will increase to an estimated
130 million (!) 3D models in the coming months (covering all UniProt sequence
clusters with up to 90% mutual sequence identity, i.e. UniRef90). A Nature
paper describing the predictions for the human proteome and mentioning the
new AlphaFold DB resource was made public today:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03828-1
The AlphaFold DB resource has been the work, carried out over a period of
about three months, of scientists, IT specialists, web designers, comms people
etc. at both EMBL-EBI and DeepMind, with the PDBe-KB team
(https://pdbe-kb.org/), led by Sameer Velankar, playing a major role.
Given the accuracy demonstrated by AlphaFold models to date, this resource is
likely to have a major impact not only on structural biology but on many
fields of science and biotechnology. Soon, for the first time in history, for
every protein sequence known to science, there will be either an experimental
structure in the PDB, or a 3D model in AlphaFold DB, or a structure for a
protein within “homology-modelling distance” of a target protein. The source
code of AlphaFold has been made open as well, so predictions for completely
new and non-natural (designed) sequences can be generated by anybody who wants
to.
Speaking from experience, it may take some time to wrap your head around the
sheer scale of the new resource and to ponder its potential impact on science.
A small group of leading structural biologists within EMBL have produced a
briefing document
(https://www.embl.org/news/science/alphafold-potential-impacts/) that
describes the technical achievements, the current limitations of AlphaFold and
some of the potential applications and opportunities for new research in a
number of (mainly structure-related) fields.
I for one am immensely excited and I invite you all to check out the new
resource.
Best wishes,
--Gerard
---
Gerard J. Kleywegt, EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK
Head of Molecular and Cellular Structure
ger...@ebi.ac.uk pdbe.org emdb-empiar.org
PA: Roisin Dunlop pdbe_ad...@ebi.ac.uk
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