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OBN Christmas Lecture
14/12/2021 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
The Impact of AlphaFold for Biology and Medicine
Presented by Prof. Dame Janet Thornton, Director Emeritus of EMBL-EBI
In July of this year DeepMind announced that their AlphaFold 2 Artificial Intelligence programme had solved one of biology’s most vexing challenges: how to determine the three-dimensional shape of a protein.
This achievement has been hailed as the most significant contribution AI has made to advancing the state of scientific knowledge to date and answers a computational problem that thousands of researchers around the world have been trying to solve for decades.
Scientists are optimistic that solving the problem will herald a new era in medicine, agriculture and even sustainable recycling and believe it to be a great illustration and example of the kind of benefits AI can bring to society.
In collaboration with EMBL-EBI, DeepMind has made the AlphaFold protein predictions, source code and methodology freely and openly available to the global scientific community, so how the scientific community plan to use the most complete and accurate picture of the human proteome to date?
OBN is delighted to welcome Dame Janet Thornton, Director Emeritus of EMBL-EBI as the special guest presenter of the OBN Christmas Lecture for 2021, who will share her insight into the ground-breaking impact of the database and the importance of open science.
Visit the event website to find out more.