Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute
Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. The works that you are going to see
today gave me shivers. You see, earlier, we talked about AlphaFold, DeepMind’s
amazing paper on protein folding. And I promised to get back to you to showas
more and more research labs how it is transforming the world around us today. This
is not your usual Two Minute Papers video, so hold on to your papers Fellow Scholars,
this is going to be an incredible ride. But wait, I hear you asking the question, what
is protein folding? A protein is a string of amino acids, these are the building blocks of
life. This is what goes in, which in reality, has a 3D structure. And that is protein
folding. Letters go in, a 3D object comes out. So, how hard is it? Well, extremely hard. It
is significantly harder than chess and Go, both of which are really challenging games to
master. But they have nothing on protein folding. Alright, first project. Plastics are very
useful. We use them for single-use drinks, bottles, clothing and carpets, and more. We all
know that, but the problem with plastics start the moment we are done with them. You see, 400
million tons of it is produced each year around the world, and unfortunately, you guessed
it right, most of them end up in landfills. And this project is about evolving enzymes. What
kind of enzymes? Well, hold on to your papers, because these are enzymes that are made
to be able to digest these plastics. Yes, that’s right. It is breaking these plastics down.
But, it gets better. It even helps recycling them, so they can be used over and over
again, infinitely. Like glass or tin cans. We don’t need to produce more
of these, which requires fossil fuels, and we can clean up these landfills with it.
This sounds like a science fiction movie, and it came right out of a paper that was
published in 2021. I am truly out of words. Now, this research group notes that
experiments like these were underway, but the protein structure prediction steps took
years and years. An entire PhD thesis took on solving a single protein structure. And now, with
AlphaFold, they only take a few minutes. And they are super accurate. Hence, biologists can run
not one experiment in a few years, but they can run hundreds, or even thousands of experiments at
the same time, almost in real time now. This is an AI collaborating with humans to solve important
problems. They call it a complete paradigm shift. But all this is just the start.
Other AlphaFold-based projects are also underway. For instance,
this research group was wondering that if it can study living proteins,
can it maybe study extinct ones too? If that would be true, that would open up
amazing new techniques is paleoproteomics, the study of ancient proteins. What
does this mean? Well, for instance, it helped this research group learn
how an ancient bird went extinct. The problem was that they couldn’t get usable
DNA out of these ancient eggs as these structures break down very quickly. Studying the proteins
of the eggshell instead would be so much more convenient because they live on for 10 times
longer, and they also need much less of them. And, are you thinking what I am thinking? Oh
yes, that is exactly what AlphaFold is for. So, they have done exactly that and were able to
compare those proteins to that of modern birds, and found out which one of the current
birds are the most similar to it. They found out that this was a large, flightless bird, similar to an ostrich that went extinct because
humans were looking to eat their eggs. AlphaFold helped solve this huge mystery, and no doubt
it will help solve many more in the future. I love how in this project, AlphaFold
is like a lens that helps us look back in time even further and even more accurately.
This is an incredible scientific achievement. It is also currently being used to study and
perhaps treat diseases that ail millions and millions of people around the world.
Once again, all this from a paper that was published in 2021. This work is perhaps
one of the most important papers of the last decade and is going to change the world for the
better as we know it. What a time to be alive! So, what do you think? What else will AlphaFold
be useful for? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for watching and for your generous
support, and I'll see you next time!
