AlphaFold Database Offers Free Access to 200 Million Protein Structures
The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database provides open access to over 200 million AI-predicted 3D protein structures. This joint project by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI dramatically accelerates biological research worldwide.
The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database provides open access to over 200 million predicted 3D protein structures, dramatically accelerating scientific research. Developed by Google DeepMind in partnership with EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), this platform uses artificial intelligence to determine a protein's shape directly from its amino acid sequence. The database achieves accuracy that competes directly with traditional experimental methods, making it a revolutionary tool for the global scientific community.
This massive dataset offers broad coverage of UniProt, the standard repository for protein sequences and annotations. Users easily search for specific proteins using sequences, names, or identifiers to view detailed structural predictions and confidence scores. The platform also provides dedicated downloads for the human proteome, the manually curated Swiss-Prot subset, and the proteomes of 47 other key organisms that are crucial to global health and biological research.
AlphaFold proves its exceptional capabilities through top rankings in the CASP14 assessment, demonstrating immediate potential to advance our understanding of protein structures. While the system still has some limitations, researchers use these predictions to study everything from malaria parasite immune evasion to plant disease resistance. For projects requiring customized analysis, scientists also have the option to generate their own predictions using the publicly available open-source AlphaFold code.