The scientific paradigm that AI has changed...When I went to the research site,

[Anchor]
It is no exaggeration to say that this year's Nobel Prize is truly an artificial intelligence and AI feast.

In particular, protein structure prediction AI, which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was evaluated as a game changer in life science.

How is it used in the actual research field?

Reporter Park Na-yeon went to the scene.

[Reporter]
When the amino acid sequence is entered on the screen, artificial intelligence creates a protein structure.

Alpha Fold 2, developed by Google DeepMind, is an AI model that predicts new protein structures by learning hundreds of thousands of protein structures that have already been identified.

Previously, X-rays or cryogenic electron microscopes were used to find out the protein structure, but the calculation was complicated and took months to years.

With Alpha Fold, you can find the structure as soon as minutes or hours at the latest depending on PC performance and reach 90% accuracy.

[Lim Dong-joon / Ph.D. Researcher at Korea University: Alpha Fold can predict structure very quickly, so we can focus on finding more candidates or solving other problems.]

Protein is a key molecule that regulates life activity, and only when you know its structure can you understand protein function.

AlphaFold and RosettaFold, who won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, both predict protein structures, and the latest version even predicts the interaction of proteins with biomolecules.

Through this, researchers are verifying gene editing technology or discovering new Alzheimer's drug candidates, and in fact, more than 10,000 papers have cited AlphaFold 2.

[Kim Hak-joong / Professor of Chemistry at Korea University] Computer-based technologies are now expanding their influence to a very deep part of the scientific community. [I think the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is very meaningful in that it's officially recognized]

Experts say artificial intelligence has changed the research landscape of biotechnology, but it is not 100% perfect and cannot completely replace experiments.

In addition, in the case of Alpha Fold 3, which was released in May, it is pointed out that the source code is not disclosed unlike the previous version, making the research expandable.

The results of this year's Nobel Prize, which was swept by AI, confirmed that the scientific research paradigm has changed.

Although there will be more AI-based research in the future, we should not lose the original attitude of science that verifies thoroughly rather than blind faith.

I'm Park Nayeon of YTN Science.





Video recording: Hwang Yu-min