Show us the data

Earlier this month, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on computational protein structure prediction and de novo protein design. The award may have seemed sudden, as algorithms from Google DeepMind and David Baker’s lab , in particular, have mostly come out in the past decade. But the field had been growing and developing for much longer. Algorithms like AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold exist only because of foundational work over the preceding years. That is not unique to artificial intelligence protein design or protein structure prediction. All science is built on what came before. But in the case of this year’s Nobel-winning work, the algorithms’ success owes much to the huge, well-maintained databases of scientific data that were used to train them. An email sent to C&EN on the day of the award underlines that debt: the prize was “wonderful,” says Sameer Velankar,