Protein research wins 2024 Chemistry Nobel for US, UK scientists
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been jointly conferred on David Baker of U.S.A., and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of the United Kingdom for their research on protein
Nobel Prize 2024: The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been jointly conferred on David Baker of U.S.A., and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of the United Kingdom for their research on protein.
"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 with one half to David Baker of University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA for computational protein design.
"And the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, London, UK and John M. Jumper Google DeepMind, London, UK for protein structure prediction”, the academy announced Wednesday October 09, 2024.
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
"Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential", the academy said.
The diversity of life testifies to proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools. They control and drive all the chemical reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein.
Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function.
Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has started announcing the winners of 2024 Nobel Prize since Monday October 07, 2024.
On the first day of Nobel Prize winners’ announcement, the academy conferred the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to U.S. scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
On October 08, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 to John J. Hopfield of Princeton University, NJ, USA and Geoffrey E. Hinton University of Toronto, Canada.
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