Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Briton and Two Americans for Unravelling Mystery of Protein Structure
On the third day of Nobel Week, 9 October, the committee selected the winners in chemistry. They are David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M. Jumper for their discoveries in protein research. This was reported by the Nobel Foundation.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is dedicated to proteins, the ingenious chemical tools of life, the prize website says.
David Baker succeeded in the almost impossible feat of creating completely new types of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting complex protein structures. These discoveries have enormous potential.
‘David Baker's first discovery is the creation of new, unique proteins. At the same time, the discovery of Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper fulfilled the dream of many scientists by providing the ability to predict the structure of proteins from their composition,’ explains Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
In 2003, David Baker first created a protein that did not exist in nature. Since then, his team has developed many innovative protein structures for medicines, vaccines, nanomaterials and even small sensors.
The discovery of Demis Hassabis and John Jumper allowed scientists to predict protein structures. The amino acids in proteins are linked together in long chains that bend into a three-dimensional structure that determines the function of the protein. Since the 1970s, scientists have been trying to predict protein structures based on amino acid sequences, but this has been an extremely difficult task.
However, four years ago, a breakthrough was made when Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed AlphaFold2, an artificial intelligence that learned to predict the structure of proteins and how they would fold into three-dimensional shapes. With the help of this AI model, scientists managed to predict the structures of almost all of the 200 million proteins known to science.
The model was published online for free, allowing scientists around the world to use it for research. Since AlphaFold2 was released in 2020, the AI model has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Thanks to this discovery, researchers can now better understand why antibiotics are becoming less effective and create enzymes that break down plastic.
‘These discoveries are changing the way we think about proteins and promise significant advances in medicine and science in general. Now we can not only predict the structures of proteins, but also create them for the needs of mankind,’ the Nobel Foundation said.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Mungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Yekimov. The scientists were awarded the prize for the discovery and development of quantum dots.
As a reminder, Nobel Week 2024 started in Europe on 7 October, Monday. The winners of the physiology and medicine prize were American scientists who revolutionised the treatment of the most serious diseases and invented microRNAs. On Tuesday, the second day of the Nobel Week, the winners in the Physics category were announced. The American-Canadian duo of scientists John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton developed the basic principle of artificial intelligence - self-learning.