When London-based artificial-intelligence (AI) company DeepMind unveiled predicted structures for some 220 million proteins earlier this year, the trove covered nearly every protein from known organisms in DNA databases. Now, another tech giant is filling in the ‘dark matter’ of the protein universe.
Researchers at Meta (formerly Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California) have used AI to predict the structures of some 600 million proteins from bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that haven’t been characterized.
Image: The ESM Metagenomic Atlas contains structural predictions for 617 million proteins.Credit: ESM Metagenomic Atlas (CC BY 4.0)