Since its release in 2021, this repository has become a bedrock in discovery and a first port of call for research projects that try to understand life at the molecular level. But previous iterations of the database lacked predictions of how proteins form complexes, which can be indispensable for their function.
Some 1 million patients in the U.S. live with a type of heart disease called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF, caused by a stiffening of a chamber of the heart that makes it much more challenging to distribute blood throughout the body. The condition has few approved therapies and high mortality rates.
Structural biology is essential for understanding diseases and for developing drugs and vaccines. Africa has few specialists in this field, owing to limited infrastructure, training and mentorship opportunities - despite the efforts of non-profit organizations such as BioStruct-Africa, which I co-founded. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00072-3Competing Interests E.N. received a 2024 Google Award for a socially impactful project enabled by AlphaFold and Google DeepMind sponsorship in 2025 to support the BioStruct-Africa structural-biology training event (series 6). E.N. is also supported by a Wellcome Trust award (grant number 222999/Z/21/Z).
Five years ago, in late November 2020, researchers at London-based Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold2. The artificial intelligence tool for predicting protein structures generated stunningly accurate 3D models that, in some cases, were indistinguishable from experimental maps, dominating a long-running structure-prediction challenge. The first version of AlphaFold was announced in 2018, but its predictions weren't nearly as good as its successor, which limited its impact.