Scientists’ Work on Protein Structure, Which Governs All Aspects of Life, Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

On Wednesday morning, University of Washington biochemist David Baker woke up to his phone ringing. When he answered the call, his wife began screaming. Baker had just been told that he, along with two other scientists, won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on protein structure.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the prize’s 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million) reward to Baker “for computational protein design,” and the other half went to Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction,” per a statement from the Nobel Committee.

“One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, says in the statement.

Simply put, proteins are molecules that run the chemical processes necessary for life. They are made of chains of amino acids—commonly considered life’s building blocks—and their specific function is determined by the complex three-dimensional shape these chains fold into.

Proteins can be described as brilliant chemical tools. They are generally built from 20 amino acids that can be combined in endless ways. Using the information stored in DNA as a blueprint, the amino acids are linked together in our cells to form long strings.

Then the magic of… pic.twitter.com/p1CkGxHI91

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

The award highlights the connection between the sequence of amino acids and a protein’s structure, which all three scientists helped reveal. “That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades,” Linke says, per the Associated Press. “So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today.”

Predicting proteins’ structure from their amino acid sequences had stumped researchers since the 1970s. But in 2020, Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2. Using this tool, they were able to predict the structure of all 200 million known proteins with an accuracy that paralleled that of conventional lab experiments.

And they did it with shocking speed, reports the New York Times. While scientists before them took years, perhaps, to predict a protein’s structure, AlphaFold could achieve the task within just a few hours—or sometimes only minutes. The technology allows for droves of scientific applications, from understanding antibiotic resistance to developing plastic-destroying enzymes.

“I was there at the birth of the problem—it looked intractable, intractable, intractable,” John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland, tells the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson and Lizette Ortega. “And then, suddenly, you’re there. It’s an extraordinary scientific journey,” he adds. “You see a whole field emerging and struggling and it seems impossible, and then you get there.”

Let’s take a closer look at this protein structure determined using AlphaFold2. This protein structure is part of a huge molecular structure in the human body. More than a thousand proteins form a pore through the membrane surrounding the cell nucleus.

Animation: ©Terezia… pic.twitter.com/840RqbJrJD

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

Almost two decades prior to the release of AlphaFold, Baker had used amino acids to build a completely new protein. Since 2003, his team has produced “one imaginative protein creation after another,” per the Nobel Committee’s statement, another accomplishment that holds huge implications for medical research. In fact, their work, which now uses A.I. similar to AlphaFold, has been used to develop medical treatments, including a Covid-19 antiviral nasal spray and a medication for celiac disease, per the New York Times.

“Structure determines function, it’s as easy as that. If we can design proteins to look in a certain way, then they might have a certain function that could be useful,” Jon Lorsch, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, tells the Washington Post.

2024 #NobelPrize laureate in chemistry David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.

In recent years, one incredible protein creation after the other has emerged from Baker’s laboratory. They range from new nanomaterials… pic.twitter.com/ViwzThsIzf

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to researchers who developed neural networks that underpin A.I., demonstrating the technology’s increasing importance in scientific fields.

Ultimately, “life could not exist without proteins,” according to the statement. “That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.