About

Predicting the 3D structure of proteins is one of the fundamental grand challenges in biology. By solving this challenge, we can dramatically deepen our understanding of human health, disease, and our environment, especially within areas like drug design and sustainability.


AlphaFold, the state-of-the-art AI system developed by Google DeepMind, is able to computationally predict protein structures with unprecedented accuracy and speed. Working in partnership with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), we’ve released over 200 million protein structure predictions by AlphaFold that are freely and openly available to the global scientific community. Included are nearly all catalogued proteins known to science – with the potential to increase humanity’s understanding of biology by orders of magnitude.

Explore stories of AlphaFold’s impact

Paper & methodologies

The paper describing the AlphaFold method is:
Jumper, J et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (Nature 2021).


For a discussion of AlphaFold’s output when applied to a whole proteome, see:
Tunyasuvunakool, K et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome (Nature 2021).