Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
The works that you are going to see today gave me shivers. You see, earlier,
we talked about AlphaFold, DeepMind’s amazing paper on protein folding. And
I promised to get back to you to showas more and more research labs how it is
transforming the world around us today. This is not your usual Two Minute Papers video,
so hold on to your papers Fellow Scholars, this is going to be an incredible ride.
But wait, I hear you asking the question, what is protein folding? A protein is a string of
amino acids, these are the building blocks of life. This is what goes in, which in reality,
has a 3D structure. And that is protein folding. Letters go in, a 3D object comes out.
So, how hard is it? Well, extremely hard. It is significantly harder than chess and Go,
both of which are really challenging games to master. But they have nothing on protein folding.
Alright, first project. Plastics are very useful. We use them for single-use drinks,
bottles, clothing and carpets, and more. We all know that, but the problem with plastics start
the moment we are done with them. You see, 400 million tons of it is produced each year around
the world, and unfortunately, you guessed it right, most of them end up in landfills.
And this project is about evolving enzymes. What kind of enzymes? Well, hold on to your papers,
because these are enzymes that are made to be able to digest these plastics. Yes,
that’s right. It is breaking these plastics down. But, it gets better. It even helps recycling them,
so they can be used over and over again, infinitely. Like glass
or tin cans. We don’t need to produce more of these, which requires fossil fuels,
and we can clean up these landfills with it. This sounds like a science fiction movie,
and it came right out of a paper that was published in 2021. I am truly out of words.
Now, this research group notes that experiments like these were underway,
but the protein structure prediction steps took years and years. An entire PhD thesis took on
solving a single protein structure. And now, with AlphaFold, they only take a few minutes. And they
are super accurate. Hence, biologists can run not one experiment in a few years, but they can
run hundreds, or even thousands of experiments at the same time, almost in real time now. This is
an AI collaborating with humans to solve important problems. They call it a complete paradigm shift.
But all this is just the start. Other AlphaFold-based projects
are also underway. For instance, this research group was wondering
that if it can study living proteins, can it maybe study extinct ones too?
If that would be true, that would open up amazing new techniques is paleoproteomics,
the study of ancient proteins. What does this mean? Well, for instance,
it helped this research group learn how an ancient bird went extinct.
The problem was that they couldn’t get usable DNA out of these ancient eggs as these structures
break down very quickly. Studying the proteins of the eggshell instead would be so much more
convenient because they live on for 10 times longer, and they also need much less of them.
And, are you thinking what I am thinking? Oh yes, that is exactly what AlphaFold is for. So,
they have done exactly that and were able to compare those proteins to that of modern birds,
and found out which one of the current birds are the most similar to it. They
found out that this was a large, flightless bird,
similar to an ostrich that went extinct because humans were looking to eat their eggs. AlphaFold
helped solve this huge mystery, and no doubt it will help solve many more in the future.
I love how in this project, AlphaFold is like a lens that helps us look back
in time even further and even more accurately. This is an incredible scientific achievement.
It is also currently being used to study and perhaps treat diseases that ail millions and
millions of people around the world. Once again, all this from a paper that
was published in 2021. This work is perhaps one of the most important papers of the last
decade and is going to change the world for the better as we know it. What a time to be alive!
So, what do you think? What else will AlphaFold be useful for? Let me know in the comments below!
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!