At the Pasteur Institute, microbiologist Aude Bernheim and her team are accelerating their discoveries thanks to AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s AI.
“Aude Bernheim, microbiology researcher at the Pasteur Institute: AI will allow us to accelerate research in unimaginable ways, even today.
I study microbes, especially bacteria. I study how these bacteria can inform us about how we humans live, and more specifically, how we defend ourselves against viruses.
In biology, there are rules that are shared by all living beings. There is DNA, and this DNA will ultimately lead to what we call proteins. And proteins are small molecular machines that do everything necessary in our cells to keep them alive. And their three-dimensional shape will actually give them their function. But until now, it was very difficult to go from the DNA sequence to the three-dimensional shape. And so that was a huge challenge to actually understand how living beings work and, consequently, to understand how diseases work.
AlphaFold will allow us to predict what shape the protein we’re interested in will have. So in a few seconds, we’ll have this shape in three dimensions. All of a sudden, I no longer needed to wait years to have this three-dimensional shape. I had it right in front of my eyes in front of a computer screen. And suddenly, it saved decades of research because we were able to fold a number of proteins that went from a few hundred per year for the entire research community to hundreds of millions. And so we see that we’re completely changing scale.
Hugo Vaysset, PhD student at the Institut Pasteur: On a daily basis, I use AlphaFold to better understand the function of a protein that interests me. I input it as input to a program that runs AlphaFold. AlphaFold runs on the Institut Pasteur’s computing cluster, and after a few minutes, I have access to the structure of my protein. And from there, I can deduce relevant information about the potential function of this protein.
I see the use of AI in biology as an opportunity that gives us more and more power, allowing us to guide our experiments and save a lot of time on the experimental side. This ultimately accelerates the entire discovery pipeline in biology.
Aude Bernheim: In research, from time to time, we have wow moments! Thanks to AlphaFold, we had one. It was realizing that there was a molecular machine in humans that very, very closely resembled a molecular machine in bacteria, but which, in humans, had not been studied. And with this resemblance, where it’s really visual, they’re the same, we said to ourselves, this creates immunity in humans too. And we proved it. And that’s potentially the beginning of lots of new therapies.
In my research, using AlphaFold is essential. So, it’s absolutely fantastic that Google is investing in providing the current and future tools that researchers like me need to move forward as quickly as possible.
AlphaFold is based on decades of public research. The data comes from academic research. And then, there was a boost with all the resources that were put in place by Google, which then also returned positively to academic research and allowed us to move forward in our work. So we see that when we work together, it produces fantastic things. It just allows everyone to move much faster and advance research and invent the science of tomorrow much more quickly.”