Topic
Computational method that predicts a protein's 3D structure from its amino acid sequence, widely used to infer function of uncharacterized proteins.
INRAE-led researchers modelled two lily moth odour receptors with AI and used them to find the species' previously unknown sex pheromone. The route could speed pheromone work on little-studied pests, though confirming the hit still took live moths.
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An international collaboration added more than 8,000 predicted viral protein pairs to the AlphaFold Database, spanning about 2,800 human-infecting viruses. The models stop at pairs and leave out the sugar coats, so trimeric targets like the coronavirus spike are largely absent.
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Stowers Institute scientists fed AlphaFold2 new aphid genomes and got about 2,400 structures of plant-hijacking proteins built on one reworked fold. Two X-ray structures anchor those predictions. What the proteins do inside a plant is still unknown.
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A PNAS study compared predicted tail fiber structures for phages tested on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and found the broader-spectrum ones differ from each other where they touch the bacterial pilus. Dozens of database relatives fit the same pattern.
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Apple researchers report that one end-to-end training run on more than 2 million sequence-and-structure pairs competes with the usual tokenizer-then-generator pipelines.
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A team in Japan, Finland, Italy and the United States mapped ordered hydration shells above a peptide assembly at subnanometer resolution, and argues that water belongs in the definition of the protein.
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NVIDIA backs its structure-prediction runtime with a production run across 4,777 proteomes rather than a benchmark chart, and the distance between that number and your cluster is mostly work BioIR never touches.
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A group at the Institute for Molecular Science added a bias energy that pushes each new AlphaFold3 prediction away from the last, and the sampled set reached open, closed and intermediate states of a subunit that AF3 alone gets wrong.
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NVIDIA's BioNeMo Agent Toolkit answers a real question for agents that know a task needs folding but not which model to call. The price of that answer is a database download and a Claude Science sandbox you have to open.
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A Science paper from Stanford reports an AI-designed phage genome that produced a functioning virus. Predicting which phage infects which bacterium is still posed as an open question.
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