PETER McMAUGH AM
Unveiling the
holy grail ATM expert columnist Peter McMaugh AM reflects on one of the biggest breakthroughs in biological science that was announced last August.
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he year 2022 will go down in history as one of the most crucial of all time. Not only have we seen the most reckless grab for power by Russian president Vladimir Putin that we have seen since Hitler, and the death of a woman who was the epitome of the anthesis of what Putin represents, but last August came the announcement from DeepMind of a step forward in biology the like of which the world has not seen since the mystery of DNA was unravelled. DeepMind (www.deepmind.com) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) company which was formed in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014. It comprises a team of scientists, engineers, ethicists and more who are “committed to solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity.” You may have heard about their earlier accomplishments using AI to play chess, but late last year they announced a breakthrough which was effectively the equivalent of unveiling the holy grail of biological science. After years of research, they have developed an AI program called AlphaFold 48
which provides the folding sequences and patterns of the 200 million proteins known to science. AlphaFold can accurately predict 3D models of protein structures and as such is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology. Why is this such a big deal? To put things into perspective, you have to appreciate how painstakingly long it took to unravel the structure of DNA. The conventional pathways of crystallography, the almost 10 years of laboratory slavery by British chemist Rosalind Franklin, set the stage for two ‘almost’ cowboys in the scientific sense, Watson and Crick, to see the inspiration in Rosalind’s images and to work out the patterns of repeating amino acids which gave the key to the structure of DNA – at that time another version of the holy grail of science. The great predictions that DNA studies would unravel the key to all human diseases and see an explosion of medical cures have been slow arriving. Why? The big stumbling block was that what DNA does is give the templates and tools for putting together the sequences of amino acids that give us
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proteins. It does this indirectly through RNA which controls the enzyme proteins which are the key to the building block proteins and systems which produce functioning organisms. Even the massive Human Genome project which set about uncovering every gene (or DNA sequences) in man took more than 10 years to reach its goal. It did get quicker and quicker along the way, bringing the costs down from hundreds of thousands of dollars to merely a few thousand. It also provided the springboard for developing new techniques, many of which are in daily use in routine lab techniques all over the world and in many industries. That the flowering of medicine flowing from DNA sequencing got stuck was caused by the lack of advancement in working out how to manipulate enzymes. It has long been known that enzymes, which are proteins, work like keys. They have specific shapes, which are dependent on the way their structural proteins fold, that give them their unique properties. We can easily represent the components of a protein and the bonds which hold their structural elements in place in a