DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today, the Alphabet-owned AI lab is offering its database of over 200 million proteins to anyone for free. 

When DeepMind introduced AlphaFold in 2020, it took the science community by surprise. Scientists had spent decades trying to understand how proteins, which are essential to life, are structured; it was considered one of the “grand challenges” of biology. Understanding how they are shaped is crucial to understanding how they function.