Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab, DeepMind has published structural predictions on proteins associated with SARS-CoC-2, the virus known to cause CoronaVirus, also known as COVID-19 using Alphafold, their new deep learning system.

“Knowing a protein’s structure provides an important resource for understanding how it functions, but experiments to determine the structure can take months or longer, and some prove to be intractable,” company researchers wrote in a blog post. “For this reason, researchers have been developing computational methods to predict protein structure from the amino acid sequence.”

AlphaFold is a deep learning system that uses ‘free modelling’ to predict the physical structure of proteins from amino acid sequences, even when no similar portion structures are available. The DeepMind team studied previously under-studied proteins of the CoronaVirus through their newest version of AlphaFold. “We recently shared our results with several colleagues at the Francis Crick Institute in the UK, including structural biologists and virologists, who encouraged us to release our structures to the general scientific community now,” stated the blog. Therefore, the team has made the results of six proteins structures from the SARS-CoC-2 and the highly accurate 3D models of the proteins open-source to allow scientists from across the globe to investigate the virus’s nature, functioning and provide a hypothesis to discover effective treatments.

Due to the seriousness of the situation of how such discoveries can help the global health emergency which has swept through 87 countries and has claimed 3,387 lives worldwide, the DeepMind team has bypassed the usual process of the findings being peer-reviewed by academic journals and experimental verification to present the results directly.

DeepMind has previously developed AI models to detect eye diseases and neck cancer.