AlphaFold

J. Jumper, Richard Evans, A. Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, O. Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A A Kohl, Andy Ballard, A. Cowie, B. Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, J. Adler, T. Back, Stig Petersen, D. Reiman, Ellen Clancy, Michal Zielinski, Martin Steinegger, Michalina Pacholska, Tamas Berghammer, Sebastian Bodenstein, David Silver, O. Vinyals, A. Senior, K. Kavukcuoglu, Pushmeet Kohli, D. Hassabis

Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental effort1–4, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined5, but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences6,7. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence—the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding problem’8—has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years9. Despite recent progress10–14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known. We validated an entirely redesigned version of our neural network-based model, AlphaFold, in the challenging 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14)15, demonstrating accuracy competitive with experimental structures in a majority of cases and greatly outperforming other methods. Underpinning the latest version of AlphaFold is a novel machine learning approach that incorporates physical and biological knowledge about protein structure, leveraging multi-sequence alignments, into the design of the deep learning algorithm. AlphaFold predicts protein structures with an accuracy competitive with experimental structures in the majority of cases using a novel deep learning architecture.

Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, A. Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore, Andrew J Ballard, Joshua Bambrick, Sebastian Bodenstein, David A Evans, Chia-Chun Hung, Michael O’Neill, D. Reiman, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Zachary Wu, Akvile Zemgulyte, Eirini Arvaniti, Charles Beattie, Ottavia Bertolli, Alex Bridgland, Alexey Cherepanov, Miles Congreve, A. Cowen-Rivers, Andrew Cowie, Michael Figurnov, Fabian B Fuchs, Hannah Gladman, Rishub Jain, Yousuf A. Khan, Caroline M R Low, Kuba Perlin, Anna Potapenko, Pascal Savy, Sukhdeep Singh, A. Stecula, Ashok Thillaisundaram, Catherine Tong, Sergei Yakneen, Ellen D. Zhong, Michal Zielinski, Augustin Žídek, V. Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Max Jaderberg, D. Hassabis, J. Jumper

The introduction of AlphaFold 21 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins and their interactions, enabling a huge range of applications in protein modelling and design2, 3, 4, 5–6. Here we describe our AlphaFold 3 model with a substantially updated diffusion-based architecture that is capable of predicting the joint structure of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions and modified residues. The new AlphaFold model demonstrates substantially improved accuracy over many previous specialized tools: far greater accuracy for protein–ligand interactions compared with state-of-the-art docking tools, much higher accuracy for protein–nucleic acid interactions compared with nucleic-acid-specific predictors and substantially higher antibody–antigen prediction accuracy compared with AlphaFold-Multimer v.2.37,8. Together, these results show that high-accuracy modelling across biomolecular space is possible within a single unified deep-learning framework. AlphaFold 3 has a substantially updated architecture that is capable of predicting the joint structure of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions and modified residues with greatly improved accuracy over many previous specialized tools.

Richard Evans, Michael O’Neill, A. Pritzel, Natasha Antropova, Andrew Senior, Tim Green, Augustin Žídek, Russ Bates, Sam Blackwell, Jason Yim, O. Ronneberger, Sebastian Bodenstein, Michal Zielinski, Alex Bridgland, Anna Potapenko, Andrew Cowie, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Rishub Jain, Ellen Clancy, Pushmeet Kohli, J. Jumper, D. Hassabis

While the vast majority of well-structured single protein chains can now be predicted to high accuracy due to the recent AlphaFold [1] model, the prediction of multi-chain protein complexes remains a challenge in many cases. In this work, we demonstrate that an AlphaFold model trained specifically for multimeric inputs of known stoichiometry, which we call AlphaFold-Multimer, significantly increases accuracy of predicted multimeric interfaces over input-adapted single-chain AlphaFold while maintaining high intra-chain accuracy. On a benchmark dataset of 17 heterodimer proteins without templates (introduced in [2]) we achieve at least medium accuracy (DockQ [3] ≥ 0.49) on 13 targets and high accuracy (DockQ ≥ 0.8) on 7 targets, compared to 9 targets of at least medium accuracy and 4 of high accuracy for the previous state of the art system (an AlphaFold-based system from [2]). We also predict structures for a large dataset of 4,446 recent protein complexes, from which we score all non-redundant interfaces with low template identity. For heteromeric interfaces we successfully predict the interface (DockQ ≥ 0.23) in 70% of cases, and produce high accuracy predictions (DockQ ≥ 0.8) in 26% of cases, an improvement of +27 and +14 percentage points over the flexible linker modification of AlphaFold [4] respectively. For homomeric inter-faces we successfully predict the interface in 72% of cases, and produce high accuracy predictions in 36% of cases, an improvement of +8 and +7 percentage points respectively.

M. Váradi, S. Anyango, M. Deshpande, S. Nair, Cindy Natassia, Galabina Yordanova, D. Yuan, Oana Stroe, G. Wood, Agata Laydon, Augustin Žídek, Tim Green, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Stig Petersen, J. Jumper, Ellen Clancy, Richard Green, Ankur Vora, M. Lutfi, Michael Figurnov, A. Cowie, Nicole Hobbs, Pushmeet Kohli, G. Kleywegt, E. Birney, D. Hassabis, S. Velankar

Abstract The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB, https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk) is an openly accessible, extensive database of high-accuracy protein-structure predictions. Powered by AlphaFold v2.0 of DeepMind, it has enabled an unprecedented expansion of the structural coverage of the known protein-sequence space. AlphaFold DB provides programmatic access to and interactive visualization of predicted atomic coordinates, per-residue and pairwise model-confidence estimates and predicted aligned errors. The initial release of AlphaFold DB contains over 360,000 predicted structures across 21 model-organism proteomes, which will soon be expanded to cover most of the (over 100 million) representative sequences from the UniRef90 data set.

M. Váradi, Damian Bertoni, Paulyna Magana, Urmila Paramval, Ivanna Pidruchna, Mala L. Radhakrishnan, M. Tsenkov, S. Nair, M. Mirdita, Jingi Yeo, Oleg Kovalevskiy, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Agata Laydon, Augustin Žídek, Hamish Tomlinson, D. Hariharan, J. Abrahamson, Tim Green, John Jumper, E. Birney, Martin Steinegger, D. Hassabis, S. Velankar

Abstract The AlphaFold Database Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB, https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk) has significantly impacted structural biology by amassing over 214 million predicted protein structures, expanding from the initial 300k structures released in 2021. Enabled by the groundbreaking AlphaFold2 artificial intelligence (AI) system, the predictions archived in AlphaFold DB have been integrated into primary data resources such as PDB, UniProt, Ensembl, InterPro and MobiDB. Our manuscript details subsequent enhancements in data archiving, covering successive releases encompassing model organisms, global health proteomes, Swiss-Prot integration, and a host of curated protein datasets. We detail the data access mechanisms of AlphaFold DB, from direct file access via FTP to advanced queries using Google Cloud Public Datasets and the programmatic access endpoints of the database. We also discuss the improvements and services added since its initial release, including enhancements to the Predicted Aligned Error viewer, customisation options for the 3D viewer, and improvements in the search engine of AlphaFold DB.