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<\/div>The Nobel prize committee announce the chemistry prize winners at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm<\/p>\n
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to David Baker<\/a>, Demis Hassabis<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0John Jumper<\/a> for their work on understanding the structure of proteins, which play vital roles in all living organisms. Hassabis and Jumper, of Google DeepMind, developed an artificial intelligence that predicts the structure of proteins<\/a>. Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, has been recognised for his work on designing new proteins<\/a>.<\/p>\n Proteins are the molecules that make life happen. All of the key machinery of life is made of proteins, from the muscles that power us and the molecules that read and copy DNA to the antibodies that protect us from infections.<\/p>\n \u201cTo understand life, you first need to understand the shape of proteins,\u201d said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, at a press conference.<\/p>\n All proteins are made of chains of amino acids, and there are around 20 different kinds of these compounds. The shape of proteins is determined by the sequence of amino acids, but the way in which the chains fold up is so complex that predicting a protein\u2019s structure from its sequence is extremely challenging.<\/p>\n \u201cFor several decades, this was considered impossible,\u201d said Linke.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Several teams have developed various computational methods of predicting protein structures, but their accuracy was low. Then Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI called AlphaFold.<\/p>\n The first version of AlphaFold, unveiled in 2018, was an improvement on other methods. The second, released in 2020, was a massive leap forward, predicting two-thirds of protein structures with more than 90 per cent accuracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n By 2022, AlphaFold had been used to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, with the results made freely available.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was an enormous breakthrough,\u201d said Johan \u00c5qvist, a member of the Nobel committee for chemistry. \u201cThis is a fantastic resource for chemical and biological research.\u201d<\/p>\n Baker has long been working on the opposite problem, that of designing a protein with a desired structure.<\/a> The possibilities here are endless \u2013 new proteins could be used to do pretty much anything, from treating diseases to creating complex nanomachines<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cDavid Baker opened up a completely new world of proteins that we had never seen before,\u201d said \u00c5qvist. \u201cIt\u2019s a mind-blowing development.\u201d<\/p>\n Baker has created software called Rosetta for doing this, which is also freely available. He and his team first demonstrated that Rosetta worked back in 2003, when they designed a protein, made it and then used a technique called X-ray crystallography to show it had the designed structure.<\/p>\n While \u00c5qvist described this 2003 work as \u201cthe big breakthrough\u201d, the protein created was small, simple and didn\u2019t do anything.<\/p>\n Baker himself described the process as more gradual. \u201cIt really happened over many years,\u201d he said. \u201cOver the last 20 years, we\u2019ve been able to design proteins with more and more complex and powerful functions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs we got better and better at that, the scope of applications became more and more exciting,\u201d said Baker. \u201cIt\u2019s been this huge opening up of possibilities, because the proteins in nature do so many different things. They mediate all the processes in our bodies and in all living things.\u201d<\/p>\n Baker also gave credit to his colleagues: \u201cI stood on the shoulders of giants. I have had, throughout my career, absolutely wonderful colleagues to work with.\u201d<\/p>\n The award came as a surprise, despite speculation that he might get it, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s turning out to be a unique, special day.\u201d<\/p>\n The chemistry prize is the third Nobel awarded so far this year. On 8 October, the 2024 Nobel prize<\/a> in physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton<\/a> for their work on artificial neural networks. On 7 October, the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun<\/a> for their discovery that tiny pieces of RNA called microRNAs play a key role in controlling genes.<\/p>\n Last year\u2019s Nobel prize in chemistry went to three of the developers of quantum dots<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 particles so small that their electrical and optical properties are influenced by quantum physics.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\n