What Is AlphaFold

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∟AlphaFold - Protein Structure Prediction

∟What Is AlphaFold

This section provides a quick introduction of AlphaFold, an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

What Is AlphaFold? - AlphaFold is an AI (Artificial intelligence) system developed by DeepMind (a Google’s sister company) that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

The diagram (source: deepmind.com) below gives you an overview of the main neural network model architecture. The model operates over evolutionarily related protein sequences as well as amino acid residue pairs, iteratively passing information between both representations to generate a structure.

Alphafold's Neural Network Model Architecture

According to the paper at https://brettkoonce.com/presentations/alpha_fold.pdf, AlphaFold uses 4 NN (Neural Networks) in its 5-step calculation process:

NN 1: draw model to generate fragments.
Simulated annealing to combine.
NN 2a: Inter-residue distances.
NN 2b: Scoring network.
Relaxation, NN 3: Final protein scoring.