In this episode, originally recorded on February 9, 2022, Roman talks to Pedro Beltrao about AlphaFold, the software developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

Pedro is an associate professor at ETH Zurich and the coordinator of the structural biology community assessment of AlphaFold2 applications project, which involved over 30 scientists from different institutions.

Pedro talks about the origins of the project, its main findings, the importance of the confidence metric that AlphaFold assigns to its predictions, and Pedro’s own area of interest — predicting pockets in proteins and protein-protein interactions.

Links:

• A structural biology community assessment of AlphaFold2 applications (Mehmet Akdel, Douglas E. V. Pires, Eduard Porta Pardo, Jürgen Jänes, Arthur O. Zalevsky, Bálint Mészáros, Patrick Bryant, Lydia L. Good, Roman A. Laskowski, Gabriele Pozzati, Aditi Shenoy, Wensi Zhu, Petras Kundrotas, Victoria Ruiz Serra, Carlos H. M. Rodrigues, Alistair S. Dunham, David Burke, Neera Borkakoti, Sameer Velankar, Adam Frost, Jérôme Basquin, Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, Alex Bateman, Andrey V. Kajava, Alfonso Valencia, Sergey Ovchinnikov, Janani Durairaj, David B. Ascher, Janet M. Thornton, Norman E. Davey, Amelie Stein, Arne Elofsson, Tristan I. Croll & Pedro Beltrao)
• Pedro’s group at ETH Zurich