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10/10/24 09:27 AM IST

Chemistry Nobel Prize 2024

In News
  • The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper. 
Work on Proteins
  • 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.
  • 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.
Critical element of life
  • Proteins are made of long chains of amino acids, which themselves are small organic molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen and sometimes sulphur.
  • There are 20 different amino acids that serve as the building blocks of proteins.
  • Different combinations of amino acids, arranged in a sequence and folded tightly into unique three-dimensional shapes, form the proteins that are vital to almost all biological processes.
  • Certain kinds of proteins, called enzymes, can speed up biochemical reactions within the body, while others can provide structural support to cells and tissues.
  • Then there are some proteins that help in immune response, while others can store nutrients or energy.
About the discovery
  • Hassabis and Jumper built upon this work to create AlphaFold. The AI tool predicts the structures of proteins using known sequences of amino acids from the database.
  • These predictions were then matched to catalogued protein structures in the other database.
  • With training, the AI tool gained sufficient accuracy in predicting protein structures, given a particular sequence of amino acids.
  • Although developed just a few years ago, the tool has already undergone multiple upgrades. Today it is being used by a large number of researchers.
  • This method is a spectacular departure from all previous efforts to decode the structure of proteins.
  • Earlier efforts involved a lot of chemistry and physics. This one uses data and computation. This is extremely interesting and promising.
Significance
  • Both the Physics and Chemistry Nobel prizes this year have been given to artificial intelligence related research.
  • The new proteins can perform functions that naturally-synthesised proteins are not designed to.
  • Theoretically, for example, a synthetic protein can be designed to degrade plastics which are otherwise not biodegradable.
  • In fact, while acknowledging the foundational work in AI that led to the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, the Nobel Committee had listed AlphaFold as one of the examples of the kind of impact that was already evident.
  • The Chemistry prize has now picked up the co-creators of AlphaFold for the honour.
Source- Indian Express

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