The Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three protein researchers

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to American researcher David Baker and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper working in Great Britain. They were recognized for their discoveries in the protein field.

Proteins are the main topic of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced three winners in this category: one half of the prize is awarded to American biochemist David Baker for computer-aided protein design. The other half is shared by research duo Demis Hassabis and John Jumper to predict complex protein structures using artificial intelligence.

“These findings have enormous potential.” The Nobel Prize Committee said To justify. “To understand how life works, we first need to understand how proteins work,” explained Heiner Link, an expert in the group. Proteins are “the unique chemical tools of life.” Together they control and direct all the chemical reactions that form the basis of life. They also serve as building blocks for hormones, signaling substances, antibodies, and various tissues.

Baker designs new types of proteins

“David Baker has achieved the nearly impossible feat of creating an entirely new class of proteins,” the team said. Born in Seattle in 1962, Baker created a new protein from amino acids in 2003. Since then, his team has produced many more proteins that are used in drugs and vaccines.

Baker’s work has actually been very useful for many researchers, Andrew Torta, professor of bioinformatics at the University of Hamburg, said in an interview. tagesschau24. There were earlier ideas about this. But getting results can take years and can be expensive. “He really narrowed it down a lot,” Torta said. Baker doesn’t just publish methods: “You can download programs and, in principle, design proteins at home in your living room.”

Hashabis and Jumper degrade protein structure

British researchers Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins. “In proteins, amino acids are strung together into long strands that fold into a three-dimensional structure that is important for protein function,” the team explained. Researchers have been trying to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences since the 1970s—they succeeded only four years ago.

Hasabis, born in London in 1976, and Jumper, born in Little Rock, USA in 1985, presented the AI ​​model “AlphaFold2” in 2020, which can be used to predict the structure of practically all 200 million proteins known to date. . The Nobel team writes that AI has been used by people in 190 different countries. For example, it could help elucidate antibiotic resistance or use enzymes to break down plastics.

Hassabis is the head of DeepMind, a Google subsidiary that specializes in AI. Jumper is the senior scientist there. According to Time magazine, he is one of the 100 most influential people in the world of AI.

Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Physics have already been awarded

This year, the most prestigious award for chemists is worth a total of eleven million kroner (about 970,000 euros). If there are multiple winners, the amount will be divided among them. Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to 192 different researchers. Two of them received it twice.

The winners of the medical category were declared on Monday and the winners of the physics category on Tuesday. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. The winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sponsored by the Swedish National Bank, will be announced next week on Monday.