Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.
Structural biology, as defined by the Journal of Structural Biology, deals with structural analysis of living material at every level of organization. Early structural biologists throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries were primarily only able to study structures to the limit of the naked eye's visual acuity and through magnifying glasses and light microscopes.
Protein structure prediction is the inference of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence—that is, the prediction of its secondary and tertiary structure from primary structure. Structure prediction is different from the inverse problem of protein design. Protein structure prediction is one of the most important goals pursued by computational biology; it is important in medicine and biotechnology.
Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), sometimes called Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction, is a community-wide, worldwide experiment for protein structure prediction taking place every two years since 1994. CASP provides research groups with an opportunity to objectively test their structure prediction methods and delivers an independent assessment of the state of the art in protein structure modeling to the research community and software users. Even though the primary goal of CASP is to help advance the methods of identifying protein three-dimensional structure from its amino acid sequence many view the experiment more as a “world championship” in this field of science. More than 100 research groups from all over the world participate in CASP on a regular basis and it is not uncommon for entire groups to suspend their other research for months while they focus on getting their servers ready for the experiment and on performing the detailed predictions.
Top7 is an artificial protein, classified as a de novo protein. This means that the protein itself was designed to have a specific structure and functional properties.
Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker lab. Rosetta@home aims to predict protein–protein docking and design new proteins with the help of about fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 GigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. Foldit, a Rosetta@home videogame, aims to reach these goals with a crowdsourcing approach. Though much of the project is oriented toward basic research to improve the accuracy and robustness of proteomics methods, Rosetta@home also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer's disease, and other pathologies.
Sir Demis Hassabis is a British computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. In his early career he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert board games player. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Advisor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has won many prestigious awards for his work on AlphaFold including the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Lasker Award. In 2017 he was appointed a CBE and listed in the Time 100 most influential people list. In 2024 he was knighted for services to AI.
David Baker is an American biochemist and computational biologist who has pioneered methods to predict and design the three-dimensional structures of proteins. He is the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington. He serves as the director of the Rosetta Commons, a consortium of labs and researchers that develop biomolecular structure prediction and design software. The problem of protein structure prediction to which Baker has contributed significantly has now been largely solved by DeepMind using artificial intelligence. Baker is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is also the director of the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design.
Robert Joseph Lefkowitz is an American physician and biochemist. He is best known for his discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family G protein-coupled receptors, for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Brian Kobilka. He is currently an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as a James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Duke University.
Arthur L. Horwich is an American biologist and Sterling Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. Horwich has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1990. His research into protein folding uncovered the action of chaperonins, protein complexes that assist the folding of other proteins; Horwich first published this work in 1989.
Franz-Ulrich Hartl is a German biochemist and the current Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in chaperone-mediated protein folding.
Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective of Foldit is to fold the structures of selected proteins as perfectly as possible, using tools provided in the game. The highest scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers, who determine whether or not there is a native structural configuration that can be applied to relevant proteins in the real world. Scientists can then use these solutions to target and eradicate diseases and create biological innovations. A 2010 paper in the science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions.
Douglas L. Coleman was a scientist and professor emeritus at the Jackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, Maine. His work predicted that there exists a hormone that can cause mice to feel full, and that a mutation in the gene encoding this hormone can lead to obesity. The gene and corresponding hormone were discovered about 20 years later by Jeffrey M. Friedman, Rudolph Leibel, and their research teams at Rockefeller University, which Friedman named leptin.
DeepMind Technologies Limited, doing business as Google DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Google. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, Germany, and the United States.
Pushmeet Kohli is a computer scientist at Google DeepMind where he holds the position of Vice President of research for the "Secure and Reliable AI" and "AI for Science and Sustainability". Before joining DeepMind, he was partner scientist and director of research at Microsoft Research and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Kohli's research investigates applications of machine learning and computer vision. He has also made contributions in game theory, discrete algorithms and psychometrics.
David Silver is a principal research scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at University College London. He has led research on reinforcement learning with AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar.
Gregg Leonard Semenza is a pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had ten research papers retracted due to falsified data.
Machine learning in bioinformatics is the application of machine learning algorithms to bioinformatics, including genomics, proteomics, microarrays, systems biology, evolution, and text mining.
AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which performs predictions of protein structure. The program is designed as a deep learning system.
Chromosome 4 Open Reading Frame 45 (C4orf45) is a protein which in humans is encoded by the C4orf45 gene. It is predicted to be localized in the cytoplasm and nucleus of a cell
