AlphaFold2 is published and the database opens

Assembled from 30 blocks · 2 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. The method was published in Nature (596, 583–589) in July 2021, and EMBL-EBI opened the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database in the same month with predicted structures for the human proteome and a set of model organisms. Publishing the method and giving away the outputs at once is what converted a competition result into infrastructure: a laboratory anywhere could now begin from a predicted structure without running the model or negotiating access to it.
3. Knowledge
4. AlphaFold
5. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
6. John Jumper
7. AlphaFold2 is published and the database opens
8. Connections
9. AlphaFold
10. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
11. John Jumper
12. CASP — Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction
13. Google DeepMind
14. John Jumper
15. Deep learning
16. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
17. AlphaFold2 is assessed blind at CASP14
18. AlphaFold2 is published and the database opens
19. The AlphaFold database expands to over 200 million structures
20. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognises protein structure prediction
21. AlphaFold
22. AlphaFold2 is published and the database opens
23. The AlphaFold database expands to over 200 million structures
24. AlphaFold
25. AlphaFold2 is assessed blind at CASP14
26. AlphaFold2 is published and the database opens
27. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognises protein structure prediction
28. Evidence
29. AlphaFold2 predicts protein structure from sequence at accuracy competitive with experimental determination for most targets, as assessed blind at CASP14 in 2020, where predictions are reported to have achieved a median domain GDT_TS of 92.4 including on free-modelling targets. V55 verification basis: the paper was NOT fetched — nature.com is blocked to this session — but search results carried the title, journal, volume 596 and pages 583–589 and attributed them to this paper, and carried the CASP14 accuracy characterisation. The 92.4 median GDT_TS figure is attributed in retrieved summaries to the CASP14 assessment literature rather than to this paper, and a curator should confirm which document reports it before it is quoted as the paper's own statistic.
30. The database opened in July 2021 with the human proteome and model organisms, expanded on 28 July 2022 to more than 200 million predicted structures covering effectively the whole of UniProt, and is reported in a 2024 database paper as covering over 214 million sequences; the FAQ states that AlphaFold has not been validated for predicting the effects of destabilising point mutations and that its output is a single conformation rather than a sample of a conformational ensemble. V55 verification basis: no EMBL-EBI page was fetched; search results carried the July 2022 two-hundredfold expansion, the 214-million figure and the paper title with attribution to EMBL-EBI, and carried the mutation and single-conformation limitations with attribution to the AlphaFold DB FAQ. The reported size at the July 2021 launch differs between summaries (figures near 300,000 and near 350,000 both appear) and is therefore not asserted. The adoption figures — over three million researchers in more than 190 countries by late 2025, over a million of them in low- and middle-income countries, and an independently analysed rise of over 40% in users' submissions of novel experimental structures — reached this record through secondary reporting of DeepMind and EMBL-EBI communications and require confirmation.