Tech
Open Database Maps Protein Complexes From 2,800 Viruses for Researchers
A global coalition released AI-predicted 3D protein complexes from more than 2,800 viruses through the AlphaFold Database.
What happened
NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, EMBL-EBI and other research organisations have released predicted 3D structures for protein complexes from more than 2,800 viruses. The dataset, generated with Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 and NVIDIA’s BioNeMo inference tools, is openly available through the AlphaFold Database. About 30% of the predicted protein interactions are new to science. NVIDIA has also released the GPU-accelerated BioNeMo Structure Prediction Pipeline, allowing researchers to predict structures for their own protein targets. The work covers viral families known to infect humans, including common-cold viruses and Mpox, and adds to a database containing more than 260 million protein and complex predictions.
Why it matters
Open access gives scientists, including those in low-resource settings, structural information that can guide research into viral diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. The predictions can be generated in minutes, but high-confidence structures still require experimental verification.
Source: NVIDIA Blog