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(GIST OF SCIENCE REPORTER) NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY 2024

(NOVEMBER-2024)

NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY 2024

The Nobel Prize Chemistry 2024 was divided, one half awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design”, the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.

Key highlights:

They have revealed proteins’ secrets through computing and artificial intelligence.

Why is work on proteins important?

Proteins are fundamental to almost all biological processes, or as the Nobel Prize website poetically says, to “the exuberant chemistry of life”.
In human bodies, for example, the protein haemoglobin transports oxygen, insulin helps absorption of glucose from blood, etc. Thus, anything that impacts protein production can have consequences for human health.
Given their central importance, proteins have been extensively studied for a long time. There was even a competition about predicting protein structures running from 1994 (called Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction, or CASP), which ended only after Jumper’s contributions to Hassabis’s work helped them win it decisively in 2020. Baker, separately, had participated in the competition in 1998.
Hassabis, had been working in the field of AI, and had co-founded DeepMind, which built AI models for board games and was later sold to Google. In 2018, he entered the CASP. His team built an AI model called AlphaFold, which displayed around 60 per cent accuracy in predicting protein structures.
While impressive at the time, this accuracy rate was not good enough. Research on AlphaFold continued, but saw a breakthrough only after Jumper joined Google DeepMind.
Baker developed Rosetta, a software to predict protein structures. Baker and his team today can create in labs, a variety of new proteins with various functions.