Abstract - David K. Johnson

Structure Prediction of Protein Monomers and Complexes Using Alphafold

“It’s a game changer. This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.” – Andrea Lupas, Max Planck Institute

“…Fantastic and will change the future of structural biology and protein research.” – Janet Thornton, European Bioinformatics Institute

The hype was palpable after Alphafold 2 finished well ahead of other teams in the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP).  Impressively, some predictions were indistinguishable from those determined by X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM.  Now that over 200 million protein structure predictions are available, with the ability to model most monomers and complexes that have not already been computed, it has never been easier for scientists to obtain a model of a protein or complex using the “gold standard” for protein prediction.  In this talk, I introduce Alphafold, how to make models, how to interpret the models, provide some examples of models made in the Computational Chemical Biology (CCB) Core, assess its limitations, and finally introduce a few ways that Alphafold models can be used to help accelerate biological and biomedical research.