2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Baker, Hassabis, Jumper

THE 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday.

The prize is divided into two halves, with one half awarded to David Baker for his work on “computational protein design” and the other half jointly awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M Jumper for their discoveries in “protein structure prediction”, according to the Academy.

The Academy noted that both awardees had “cracked the code for proteins’ remarkable structures”, with Baker successfully creating entirely new types of proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper developed an artificial intelligence model that solved a 50-year-old problem of predicting complex protein structures, offering significant potential for understanding protein structures.

Proteins typically consist of 20 different amino acids, often referred to as the building blocks of life. In 2003, David Baker used these blocks to design a new protein unlike any previously seen. Since then, his research group has generated numerous innovative protein designs, including proteins that can serve as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors.

The second discovery relates to the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long chains that fold into three-dimensional structures, which are crucial for their function.

Since the 1970s, researchers have struggled to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, a task that was “notoriously” difficult. However, a significant breakthrough occurred four years ago. — ANI

Source- The Global New Light Of Myanmar