The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker for computational protein design and jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction.
David Baker’s work on computational protein design
- Computational protein design (CPD) aims to create new proteins with novel functions or properties not found in nature.
- David Baker successfully created new proteins (synthetic proteins), starting with his first designed protein ‘Top7’.
Work of Demis Hassabis and John Jumper on protein structure prediction
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve a 50-year-old problem of predicting proteins’ complex structures i.e., how proteins fold into shapes that determine their functions.
Significance of discovery: Knowing protein shapes is key to understanding cell function and better structure prediction aids in areas like drug design, understanding antibiotic resistance, developing enzymes to break down plastic, crop resilience etc.
