Category: Quantum

Quantum computing to untangle (or rather, entangle?) protein folding

It might take time, but with your list of clues you would probably be able to piece together your Lego set eventually. But in the case of protein folding, no supercomputer is powerful enough to make any significant advancement on its own. That’s where quantum computers come into play. 

Manya Bhargava returns to the IMSE blog to continue exploring the protein folding problem. In her previous blog, she explained how AlphaFold (AI system) uses known structures to predict the structures of unknown proteins. However, any AI system relies heavily on experimentally obtained data. On this new blog entry, Manya explains how quantum computers help to advance the problem by providing new solutions.

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Predicting protein structures and building Legos

We welcome back guest blogger, Manya Bhargava, to explain this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize, awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, for the development of AlphaFold! Developed by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI, AlphaFold is an AI system that predicts protein structures.

Imagine you’ve just bought a new Lego set. You’re super excited to get started. You have the pieces arranged, and all you need are the instructions to tell you how to fit them together. But someone seems to have played an awful prank on you. Instead of instructions in the box, you find a long list of clues about how the blocks need to fit together. Blue blocks can only connect to yellow ones, flat bricks can only be on the top… and so on. You know what the final model should look like, but this sure makes it much harder to build!

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