Cited by 3,378Protein Structure and DynamicsMachine Learning in BioinformaticsEnzyme Structure and Function

Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning

Open access
Senior, Andrew W., Evans, Richard, Jumper, John, Kirkpatrick, James, Sifre, Laurent, Green, Tim, Qin, Chongli, Žídek, Augustin +11 more·2020·Nature

Abstract

Protein structure prediction can be used to determine the three-dimensional shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence 1. This problem is of fundamental importance as the structure of a protein largely determines its function 2; however, protein structures can be difficult to determine experimentally. Considerable progress has recently been made by leveraging genetic information. It is possible to infer which amino acid residues are in contact by analysing covariation in homologous sequences, which aids in the prediction of protein structures 3. Here we show that we can train a neural network to make accurate predictions of the distances between pairs of residues, which convey more information about the structure than contact predictions. Using this information, we construct a potential of mean force 4 that can accurately describe the shape of a protein. We find that the resulting potential can be optimized by a simple gradient descent algorithm to generate structures without complex sampling procedures. The resulting system, named AlphaFold, achieves high accuracy, even for sequences with fewer homologous sequences. In the recent Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction 5 (CASP13)-a blind assessment of the state of the field-AlphaFold created high-accuracy structures (with template modelling (TM) scores 6 of 0.7 or higher) for 24 out of 43 free modelling domains, whereas the next best method, which used sampling and contact information, achieved such accuracy for only 14 out of 43 domains. AlphaFold represents a considerable advance in protein-structure prediction. We expect this increased accuracy to enable insights into the function and malfunction of proteins, especially in cases for which no structures for homologous proteins have been experimentally determined 7.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41586-019-1923-7

Cites

57 of 57 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Existing protein structure prediction methods fall far short of atomic or experimental accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available, limiting their utility for many biological applications.

    “Despite recent progress10–14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available.”

    From Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (2021) · cites this paper as [10]

  • Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are driving a revolution across science, enabling exciting new results across chemistry, biology, and medicine.

    “Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are driving a revolution across science, enabling exciting new results across chemistry,80–82 biology,83,84 and medicine.85–88”
  • AlphaFold has achieved remarkable precision in modelling intramolecular relations, enabling prediction of a protein's three-dimensional structure solely from its DNA sequence.

    “Surpassing the capabilities of any human-conceived model, the neural-network-based algorithm Alpha-Fold has achieved remarkable precision in modelling intramolecular relations, enabling it to tackle one of molecular biology's greatest challenges: predicting a protein's three-dimensional structure solely on the basis of its DNA sequence 65 .”

    From Machine culture (2023) · cites this paper as [65]

  • In recent years, there has been major progress in utilizing residue co-evolution information for predicting structures of individual proteins, based on rapid growth of experimental data and new ideas, combined with deep learning.

    “In recent years, there has been major progress in utilizing the residue co-evolution information for predicting structures of individual proteins, based on the rapid growth of experimental data on proteins and new ideas on how to use it, combined with spectacular advances in computer science (deep learning) [30–33].”

    From Challenges in protein docking (2020) · cites this paper as [30]

  • AlphaFold uses a deep neural network to generate and/or interpret the amino-acid proximity network as a central data structure.

    “For instance, AlphaFold, a recent major achievement in protein folding prediction (Senior et al., 2019, 2020), uses a deep neural network to generate (initial AlphaFold version) and/or interpret (most recent implementation) the amino-acid proximity network as a central data structure.”

    From Mapping the multiscale structure of biological systems (2021) · cites this paper as Senior et al., 2020

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Xu, J. Protein structure modeling by predicted distance instead of contacts in CASP13 Ab- stracts Dec. 1, 2018 (2018), 146-7.
  2. Zhang, C., Li, Y., Yu, D. & Zhang, Y. Contact map prediction by deep residual fully convo- lutional neural network with only evolutionary coupling features derived from deep multiple sequence alignment in CASP13 Abstracts Dec. 1, 2018 (2018), 181-2.
  3. Kandathil, S., Greener, J. & Jones, D. DMPfold: a new deep learning-based method for protein tertiary structure prediction and model refinement in CASP13 Abstracts Dec. 1, 2018 (2018), 84-5.
  4. Xu, J. Distance-based Protein Folding Powered by Deep Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.03481 (2018). · arXiv
  5. Jones, D. T. & Kandathil, S. M. High precision in protein contact prediction using fully convolutional neural networks and minimal sequence features. Bioinformatics 1, 8 (2018).

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Senior, A. W., Evans, R., Jumper, J., Kirkpatrick, J., Sifre, L., Green, T., Qin, C., Žídek, A., Nelson, A. W. R., Bridgland, A., Penedones, H., Petersen, S., Simonyan, K., Crossan, S., Kohli, P., Jones, D. T., Silver, D., Kavukcuoglu, K., & Hassabis, D.
Affiliations
  • Google DeepMind (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • The Francis Crick Institute (GB)
Corresponding author
Senior, Andrew W.
Venue
Nature
Published
2020-01-15
Volume
577
Issue
7792
Pages
706-710
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
OpenAlex
W2999044305
Cited by
3,378
References
57
Citations by year
2026: 277 · 2025: 444 · 2024: 454 · 2023: 509 · 2022: 621 · 2021: 823 · 2020: 241 · 2019: 6
FWCI
177.94
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
  • Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Materials Chemistry › Enzyme Structure and Function
Keywords
protein structure prediction, AlphaFold, potential of mean force, neural network potentials, contact prediction, gradient descent, CASP13
MeSH terms
Deep Learning, Amino Acid Sequence, Models, Molecular, Protein Conformation, Proteins, Software, Protein Folding, Caspases, Datasets as Topic

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review