My name is Charles Godfrey, I am director of the Oxford Martin School.
And thank you for joining us on an extra Web conversation that we're having over the last term.
We've been having a series of conversations on the topic of what the slogan building back better means after the pandemic.
And that series stopped last week. But something else happened last week.
And this was a really interesting scientific bonds, a potential solution of what is known as a protein folding problem.
And we have a number of emails which asked us, might we have a talk to explore some of the exciting issues around that?
And that is what this talk is today. And I'm joined by two really interesting guess.
One who you can see who's filled begin in front and one who you'll be able to hear, but I'm afraid not see because of a technical issue.
And that is Yvonne Jones. Yvonne, can I just cheque that you are there and listening to us?
I am. And I'm really sorry, everybody. Sorry, Charles and not Brandon.
As being as Charles said, there's something weird has happened to the camera and my laptop and it just refuses to.
There is a gremlin somewhere. So let me begin just by introducing Yvonne.
So Yvonne is professor of Protein Crystallography at Oxford.
She's a fellow of the Royal Society. She co-founded at Oxford with Dave Stewart, the Division of Structural Biology,
which is part of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Met of Clinical Medicine, of which she is Kohat at the moment.
And Phil Felbeck and is professor of computational biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry, which is part of our medical science division.
And rather than me doing,
I'm going to ask fellin Yvonne in about two sentences just to give us a flavour of the work in their lab at the moment involved.
Might you go first? Sure. I'm interested in the receptors that sit on cell surfaces and taken signals in the
form of proteins that bind to them to allow cells to communicate to each other.
I'm particularly interested in signalling between cells in both in the developing nervous system and also cells involved in the immune system.
And I use protein crystallography to solve those structures,
but I also bring in lots of other techniques because I'm really interested in the way that the proteins interact with each other,
not just in their shape. Thank you. Volume. Yes.
And my lab is also interesting in receptors.
But we predominantly use molecular dynamics simulation technology to look at the underlying dynamics of these proteins.
Looking at things like channels and transport of proteins.
And although we don't do a structure prediction, say, many of the underlying computational methods that they use, we also use as well.
Thank you very much both. So what we're going to do is we're going to just chat very briefly about what a protein is.
And I realise that many people listening will be very familiar with it.
But we're going to have a brief discussion of that just to bring people up to speed.
If they don't know about it. And then we'll go on to what exactly this recent advances and some of the consequences of it.
Now, those of you watching a live in crowd cast will see that darn near the bottom right hand of your screen.
There is a bus. No facility could ask a question. We do really encourage you to ask a question.
There's also the facility to vote questions up so that if someone else has asked the question that you're really interested in seeing answered,
then you you're able to vote it up.
And while it's not exactly a strict democracy when it comes to looking for questions, I see the ones which have got have got the most support.
So let's explore a little bit about the background.
And if on Patch, I go to you just to remind us about what a protein is and why we're worried or why we are interested in its three dimensional shape.
OK, so proteins are the little machines or the little workers in ourselves and also messengers that go between ourselves.
They're encoded by the in the genome, by our DNA sequences, which are translated into what have been described as beads on a string.
So there are a number of different flavours of amino acids.
And these form into polypeptide chains, so long strings of beads, each of which have rather different properties.
Some of them are positively charged and negatively charged or some sticky sort of oily amino acids.
And according to those properties, the beads on the string will fold up into a complex Three-Dimensional Structure.
I heard John Thornton on the on the Today programme, actually, when this announcement about the protein folding problem hit the news week or so ago.
And she described it as. Yes, sort of.
You start out with a shoelace and you're kind of, you know, forming that or tying it up into the three dimensional shape.
So now that kind of origami. Absolutely. Yes.
And why is it interesting the way that it all folds up?
Well, because each protein has its own unique shape, its own unique fold,
and that fold, that shape that it has in three dimensions determines its properties.
What it can do. I just said that that that like little machines in our cells or the messenger is going between cells.
So they are capable of doing all the tasks that we need doing but to do those tasks.
They have a very specific shape. And if you don't know, I'm not explaining this very well.
If you don't know the shape. It's a bit like not knowing what's underneath the bonnet of a car.
You can't work out how they work if you don't know what shape they are.
So understanding a three dimensional shape has really critical.
Now, your professor approaching crystallography,
might you say how crystallography an X-ray diffraction is used to to construct a three to mine to determine a three dimensional shape?
Right. Well, the problem is obviously that that proteins are too small to be able to visualise in using like microscopy.
So there are a number of older its magnitude smaller than than you could do that using using visible light to to to see that detail.
But you can use X-rays. They have a wavelengths that is able to pick up that fine structure.
If you do that, you you can't really just do that by having a single copy of a protein and hitting it with an x ray with x rays.
You need many copies of the protein to all lined up rather nicely in in a crystal structure.
Crystal structures just so that the crystal is just a trick and amplification method.
So you're able to look at many,
many copies of the protein at once and that will give you a strong enough signal to be able to actually solve the structure.
Unfortunately, it's a bit it's a bit more tricky than that because you don't actually manage to
measure all the information you need just from the the amplitudes of the diffract.
Did x rays, as we call them.
There is some other sort of missing bits of information to do with the timing of the phase of the different refracted rays coming off.
A part of the complexity of the problem. Is why so many Nobel prises have gone to x ray crystallography over the years.
I guess. I guess I guess maybe initially that would be a case, because when people like Darcy Hodgkins working in Oxford,
Max Perutz and John Kendrew working in Cambridge, when they started out, it was a mammoth task.
And they had to work out all the methods of how you could how you could even begin to sort out
what a protein structure would look like if they had no idea what it was going to look like.
But. From the beginning, the people who always cheer because it's a difficult thing to do.
Always chosen, structured, trying to do structures that are going to be very enlightening for the biology.
So in the case of Dorothy at she she worked for many years on insulin.
She thought this is going to be an important structure to understand,
because ultimately we want to be able to make forms of insulin that will help diabetics and mobile proteins be crystallised.
Although some proteins that you just can't get a structure out of using this approach.
Yeah, I mean, for many proteins that we have succeeded in in crystallising the various tricks.
Quite a lot of them work over many years to get to persuade them to crystallise using different techniques to get them to crystallise.
But there are also some proteins that have just never crystallised.
Now then quite why that might be one. One whole set of proteins that weren't crystalise are those that are only partially structured.
Don't really become structured when they interact with other proteins.
Well, that's another whole different different problem. But yeah, that we do.
Yeah. It's it's a bit of a blackout persuading them to crystallise.
But of course, you know, there are other methods for doing experimentally solving Three-Dimensional Protein Structures.
I was going to ask you about that. But you have a lot of outcry.
OEM, might you just explain what matters and what different scientists make to a protein that structural studies?
So I was saying that x rays are can can can allow you to probe the fine,
the fine detail that sort of dimensions of the distances between atoms that you need to know to visualise a protein structure.
Well. Electrons can allow you to do that as well.
So an electron microscope will allow you to solve the protein structure.
But for many years, that promise of a big able to solve the protein structure was out of reach.
The first hurdle was, again, that you need to be able to look at a time to gather the information from a lot of different copies of the protein.
And each one individually would be damaged very rapidly by being hit by the electrons in electron microscope.
So you have to be able to do cryopreserved to embed them in in vitreous ice in a way
that people discovered ways of being able to do that without damaging the protein.
But then you need to be able to collect huge amounts of data to do so very sensitively.
So you need really, really good detective systems. And then you need really, really good computer power to crunch them,
because some of the the tricks that we've been able to use in protein crystallography,
the fact that we've got crystal, the computer has to do that for the criterium.
It has to be able to add together all the individual images from many, many, many,
many, many copies of the individual protein molecules that you've got on your bank.
We had a grid get so needed, really good computers needed, really big advances in detectors and bingo, you start to be able to do it.
And that's opened the door for lots of proteins that were recalcitrant when it came to crystallising them.
So now we can use the two techniques in tandem. It's really powerful and exciting.
Thanks a lot. Come on. So that seems sort of physical, direct way of estimating protein structure.
But of course, for most proteins, we have the amino acid sequence. We have the sequence of beads on the string that Yvonne talked about.
And we pretty much know the different ways that the molecules interact.
So, Phil, you have all this information. Why is it not straightforward just to use a big computer to calculate the three dimensional structure?
Why is there a protein folding problem? Yes, it sounds such a simple question, doesn't it?
We got the sequence to should be able to just compute the structure. And the best way probably to explain this was, is that kind of thought exercise.
That is a classic paradox that many people probably have heard of and formulated by serious elemental.
In 1969, when he noted that it would take longer than the age of the known universe to enumerate
all possible configurations of a typical protein by brute force calculation.
So he estimated that something like 10 to the power of 300 possible confirmations for a typical protein.
And, you know, two out of that in each confirmation would require even picosecond of time would mean that actually that require time,
way beyond even the age of the universe.
And just to put that in context, the context, the age of the universe is about 14 billion years, which is about four times 10 to the 17 seconds.
So, yes, that's why it's such a hard problem, because you can't solve it by brute force,
because you'd have to numerical calculate all of the energies of these different potential confirmations.
And even if you had a very fast way of doing that, it would just simply be very intuitive.
You wouldn't have enough computer. And yet, you know, a nature proteins fold spontaneously, something within milliseconds.
And that dichotomy is referred to as the minerals paradox.
So if you can't do it by brute force, what approaches have computational biochemist taken over the last 50 years?
Yes. So that's your question. So I would say you could even go back beyond that, actually, you could probably go back to the 50s.
The first prediction, if you like, can be attributed to Powerlink and Corey, who first suggested this notion that they would be out.
He loses and sheets and they're going to do.
Just to interrupt you there. Alpha. I see. And sheets, apart from protein structures that you get into lots of different proteins that are
sort of common theme that you get three three deaths in Iraq as sort of substructure,
if you like. That's probably the right way to think of them. Yes, exactly, sir.
Yes, sir. Sir. So Alpha Helices had this kind of Ilic ethical kind of confirmation in sheets.
It just kind of extended strand confirmations.
And the 50s was also a time when the first sequence was actually elucidated, which haven't just mentioned incident.
Incident, I think was the first sequence that was elucidated by Fred Syma.
And around this time, Antonsen was also doing this quite famous experiments on RNA and looking at how they would fall.
And that's a now very famous experiment that he did in 1961,
which concluded with a statement which was basically that the nature confirmation of
a protein is determined entirely by the amino acid sequence in a given environment,
but that the latter flies off and left off.
It's actually superimportant that this given environment and then obviously that became a thing to predict, try and predict the 3D structure.
But I would say most effort was focussed on the smaller task of being able to predict the secondary structure.
So by that, I mean he's out helixes in sheets so he could just work out which bits might adopt these helical bits or strand strands.
That would be a good start. And so a lot of the early work sort of dates back to work.
Chewin Fischman in about 1974 was the first, I would say the first real prediction of structure, this decision sheets, if you like.
And they simply said, well,
we'll just use the statistical propensities of the amino acid residues to form a specific structural element or secondary structural element.
And they did that and that was quite successful. And ever since then, people have been trying to extend that.
And people have started to employ, for example,
neural networks in the late 80s and 90s that was first on to secondary structure prediction quite successfully.
And that's still still ongoing. And then I suppose the next thing to note that this particularly important in the context
of a protein structure prediction is the is the establishment of the PDB in 1971.
So that's that protein databank,
which is essentially a database with which is where the structures that Yvonne was talking about that you derive from x
ray crystallography are deposited in such a way that it means that anybody around the planet can actually access them.
And we're gonna be coming onto that when we talk about Alpha fold. And forgive me, felt just hurrying along to it.
Could you tell us a little bit about the CASPA competition? Yes.
So the cash competition was something of a set up in a nineteen ninety four stands
for Past Stands with the critical assessment of structure prediction software.
94 people in the field kind of realised that they needed some way of trying to assess how good these predictions really were.
And the idea was simply to do this in a double blind experiment.
So double blind in the sense that you would release the sequences of rupture and withhold the structure itself back and allow participants to enter.
They were entering a blind way,
meaning that the people who were going to assess the submissions didn't know who the people are making those submissions were.
And it was a very successful competition. There were 33 targets at the time, about 35.
I think groups took part in that and made about 100 predictions.
And that model has been followed up. And it was so successful.
It's still going now. Obviously, it was way as we know, but it was also copied.
So there was also something called Caffery, which is the critical assessment of protein interactions that are set up in 2001.
That's still going as well.
There was also something called Cafer Critical Assessment of function annotation that was set up in 2010 that I stopped in 2014, I think.
But I think the community still active. And another related set of competitions is called Sample,
which stands for this statistical assessment of the modelling of proteins and ligands and the name,
as it suggests that the idea of that is to focus more on problems to do with Miggins and their interactions with parties.
And that's something that my group personally, I'm a little bit more involved with it in the last couple of years.
And it's interesting you say that on a population, biologists and certainly.
The mathematic mathematical population biologist, my area have looked with great envy at Caspa and the success of Bitton.
We've tried to think whether we could set up something equivalent to Snarfing or.
But so far have failed. Maybe all the headlines because it is a bomb.
Can I just interject? No, it's just from the perspective of an experimentalist.
I mean, Caspa. Is it. Is it. Is it the fantastic community effort?
The guys that run cars go round,
get in touch with all the experimentalists in the run up to the competition and ask us if we've got any structures that we haven't yet published.
And so it's there's a real interplay between the experimental experimentalists community and and the, you know,
the protein folders, because that's where they're getting they're getting structures that we haven't yet published.
I myself haven't the timing has never been quite right for me to be able to give them something.
But, you know, these these Emo's pop into my inbox every couple of years.
Twenty years ago, when I worked at Imperial College,
I remember going to a tremendous party when Mike Sternberg's group that had done very well in the cask competition of that year.
Phil, you mentioned machine learning and neural nets.
And the headlines that we saw right at the beginning of the month was that I had solved the protein folding problem.
And you've mentioned that various forms of machine learning.
So using a computer,
particularly based on a neural net to scan many different to learn from many different existing is to try and protect you once had been used before.
Can you tell us a little bit about what is special that the approach that the mind and Alpha fold have taken and what they have achieved that is new?
Yeah. OK. So the first thing I think that just needs to be clarified a little bit here is that they actually haven't solved protein folding per say.
It's more correct to say that they've solved the protein structure prediction problem rather than the folding problem,
which is a bit more complicated, actually.
And if you even want to be more precise, you could argue they solved the prediction of crystal structures of proteins.
So the question really is, how did they do it then? And the real answer is we don't actually know the precise details of how well it works,
because I've been very cagey about what they've been saying in the in the announcements.
But presumably we will learn exactly how that works when you have paper papers appear in due course over presumably the next year.
We do know, however, a little bit about how their previous entry work.
So going back to the previous CAFS version, Alpha fold one, if you want to call it that,
that we do we do know roughly how they work because they did release a version of the code and so you could look at that and tinker with it.
And that kind of works and builds on actually what a lot of other people were doing,
which was to employ this concept of multiple sequence alignments to great effect.
So one of the big developments, which was which was I should also mention, which is terribly important, was the developments in sequencing.
And because off around the two thousands and beyond that,
they suddenly appeared this vast amount of data in terms of the sequences that were available.
And this actually allowed you to by doing a very large, multiple sequence, allow alignment.
You can actually look at which residues in which positions seem to COBOL and the IP, which is a residue of this position, would change over here.
And it looked like it would change to something else over here at roughly the same in graphics, in the same sequence.
And the idea was by looking at how strongly these evolved,
you could actually then predict where the idea was that they might be close together in space.
And you could use that to kind of then create a kind of pairwise distance constraint on the building of the model.
And actually, that's what a lot of people had done prior to the success of our default.
And that's what Apple folded in their first entry, to all intents and purposes,
intents and purposes, combined with a little bit of tweaks around the outside, as it were.
Now, also fold one appears to be a little bit different.
And this is the step change, which we obviously have to wait to generally find out what the the details of that are.
But it appears genuinely end to end in that a sequence goes in one end and our hopes,
how hopes the structure which is which is which is which is incredibly impressive.
But what we do know is that it appears to, four, adopt a kind of much more dynamic,
dynamic learning approach within it to work out kind of as it's going along,
which pieces of information from the sequences are more important than others.
And this. Hands on a new piece of deep, relatively new piece of deep learning architecture, which I don't really know anything about it.
It's called a 3D quivering transformer for those who are interested.
It was also developed by a team at Google in 2017. So it's not surprising that it's been used in Alpha, too.
It's been demonstrated the use of that kind of architecture has been used very successfully in language translators.
That's probably where most people might say they're interested, might have come across it before.
So that was that was definitely one of the big differences.
The other difference is, is that it requires a lot of computational power as well, so that they do require a lot of resource to do it.
I think they use something like 128 vertical tensor processing units.
That's roughly about 200 GP use, I think, over a few weeks.
So they had. So there are some differences.
We don't know quite the full extent of the methodology yet, but it's kind of builds on what people have done before.
But there is a step change, definitely, and an employment of new are new deep learning architectures to teach to make this significant jump,
if you like, in in the predictive power. I've heard that in trying to solve protein structures that the expert humour the you and Yvonne
and sometime provide insight that sort of straight mathematical brute force fails to provide.
And that what might be happening is that the. New autofill machine learning is in some ways replicating that by a chemical insight that humans had.
That is a truth. And that was, after all.
I don't yeah. I sort of heard that sort of thing said before as well.
And I I'm not sure if that's the correct way to think about it.
To be honest, I think it's partly because I don't actually know enough of the underlying
details of the of the new architecture to give you an honest answer about that.
So, yeah, I'm not sure whether that's true or not. That's a not very good answer.
And open. That's right. Oh, yeah.
You've all come from a point of even more ignorance when it comes to the third approach.
But I mean, from what I understand of the the the the previous approach,
the one from two years ago, as Phil was saying, it's it's this idea that, you know,
the yellow bead and sort of the blue eat in a red bead from different parts of the beads on the string, like you actually end up close to each other.
Only when the when the proteins are is actually in its Three-Dimensional Shape.
And actually, as a Yeah. As a as a structural biologist, often we find.
Finally finalising the structure of a protein. I'll be looking at it and I'll be thinking, yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense that an arginine should be should be, you know, close to a despotic acid.
So a blue and a red type B, it's a close together.
So it's a similar thing. Now that the eye is matching,
you could sort of think that that artificial intelligence has learnt that because it's learnt these rules by going through looking at the I
believe they quoted a one hundred and seventy thousand protein structures in the protein database that they were able to use to learn from,
as well as, of course, all these sequence alignments. But what I also read somewhere that that the latest iteration,
the one that's provided the breakthrough is is not just sort of looking at a pair of pairwise,
but something more like building up kind of a jigsaw puzzle and that you you put together things in you know,
you put together all the bits that are sort of the tree and the bits that are the river bits that are the.
Cow crossing the river. And then it sort of clumps it all, but puts it all together, you see what I mean?
And I imagine, again, that, you know, there are blocks of of of areas in proteins that it just then makes sense that these would come together.
But I'm. Yeah. Who knows? It's going to be extremely interesting to see exactly how they did it.
And it's not a related question. Has that. Machine learning, to a certain extent, is a black box.
You have inputs in and outputs out. But there's a lot of work in trying to actually reconstruct what is happening within that black box.
And do you think that when that is done with deep foaled, that it might say anything about how proteins physically fold in nature?
Or do you think you'll be just much more patterned pattern matching?
So is getting an answer without it telling you anything about the physical processes involved?
My feeling is it won't tell you anything about folding. Actually, I think it ultimately is is it is a bit more of just a pattern matching.
I don't think you'll get much information about the actually how it folds.
This is this is a data versus physics problem almost in that sense.
You know, now we are you know,
previously we we were kind of thinking that this problem would be solved by just using our crude understanding of other entry physics.
But this is this is actually the other thing that's now become prevalent, which is making use of all the all the data that's out there.
And I don't think actually you'll get much.
And that's good news for academics working on folding plus eight, because that's that they making probably a bit more comfortable and sleep at night.
But I don't think they will get much. There's much to be had looking at Olding for years.
Thank you. Yvonne, when the news came out, I think it's November 30th and December the 1st,
then it sort of made the front page of newspapers and was on the on and on radio and television within the field.
How much of a surprise was this to you guys? Did you did you know it was coming?
Were you surprised by how good the project predict predictions were in the final cast round?
I guess I am actually, I suppose. Yeah, I would not have predicted that it would be this particular cast.
I mean that because there have been periods where instead of progress every two years,
you know, that they looked at one stage like the field with stalling. And then and then things started happening again.
Then they were sort of new approaches and big jumps forward.
And you could imagine that that artificial intelligence,
that that machine learning was going to be able to to mine these these huge databases now and make a big step forward.
And a lot of people would trying to do this.
But I guess when I first woke up, I thought, well, I've heard this on the Today programme or whatever.
I thought, well, how good is it? And I again, I've been rummaging around a bit trying to find out.
And there are some. Figures.
The pictures provided, which show very impressive, what we call super positions.
So they've taken the experimental structure and they've overlapped.
They've superimposed onto it the the the bottle that they had come up with.
And you know that to sit. But we identify on top of each other.
But the caveats to that are that they that that individual protein structures.
So they managed. To come up with something that, you know, if if we were talking about insulin,
they would have been able to predict what insulin looks like and it would look very much as Dorothy Hodgkins.
So I don't know.
Well, again, I saw one picture that implied that the actually the the real details cause that the beads aren't just a little sort of beads.
Isn't that all the beads on top of each other in the correct positions?
It's that you've you've got actually the the detail of what each residues, each side chains of the residues that wear their position.
Getting that with that. I think that probably the numbers that I've seen quoted are that they're accurate to within
maybe two angstroms overall of the match in position on average of everything in the.
Well, in the in the main chain in the final. But it time that would have to do certain things.
And I think that's going to be fun to just chat over for a few minutes now. They've done nothing.
Got to interrupt that. So strong. That's about the size of an atom. Just to give people.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
And the reason I'm setting about how accurate it is is that you need things to be accurate to within less of an angstrom actually to be able to.
Too accurate to use structures then to actually act accurately,
design drugs that you might want to to use to to jam some, you know, to to fit into part of of a protein structure.
And, for example, stop it working if, for example, you want to to block a protein machine that's important for for a viral function or something.
So you need a very high level of accuracy for certain sorts of things to be evolved.
I don't know, I. I think they are. I think going to be able to get that they they have clearly got there.
But some of the medium sized proteins, it's extremely impressive.
But the next challenge, and they say this themselves in their press release is, is to be able to then look at not just one protein by itself,
but these complexes, proteins, because proteins that don't actually usually wander around by themselves.
They there are gangs of them. They're not very good at socially isolating proteins together.
So just to cheque, I understand you correctly. You're impressed by the structures that they are producing at the moment,
but you worry that they might not be quite as good to show where every atom is.
And you need to know where every atom is if you're trying to design a drug.
Because typically a drug needs to fit in like a lock, a key in the lock.
And so you really need high accuracy, which at the moment you you do require a physical means.
I'm looking at the structure rather than the computational. I think it's probably a little it's still that's still a little bit off from being
able to to be able to help with that directly with the drug design side of things.
But having said that, there's a lot of protein structures that aren't actually good enough,
experimentally determine protein structures that aren't good enough to be able to really guide drug design.
You need you need only the very best structures are good enough for that.
So it's a I'm setting them a very high bar in saying that. And I think that it's extremely impressive what they've been able to do.
And they are clearly able to, for many protein sequences,
predict what that protein is going to look like to sufficient accuracy to be able to say, give up the idea of maybe how it works or what it does.
But. There are still big questions about how it will be able to interact with other proteins.
At the moment they're not able to predict that whilst we can do structures either using cryo
anymore or X-ray crystallography of the clusters of proteins and see how they fit together.
And it's often in the way that they sit together. That's important for for their function.
For instance. So, Phil, let me go to you as a computational barkhad chemist.
Yeah. And. How are you feeling as well about the relative weather?
I mean, I think actually, if we if it's fair, it's a very impressive result, whichever way you look at it.
I don't think anybody 20 hurt in the cast. 13 would have predicted that the alcohol would have done as well as they have done in this in this event.
This is notable. And the reason is a lot of hype is notable, has some for a lot of for a few reasons, actually.
The first is that alcohol, too, is not just a head, but it is more than twice as good as the next best entry.
And that was true across nearly all the targets. I think I'm correct in saying that not that would be impressive enough, actually.
But this time, the reason why there's a lot of hype, I think,
is actually that for the accuracy, as measured by something called the global distance score,
which is which is another metric which I won't go into,
but anything above 90 is considered informally at least, to be rivalling experimental accuracy.
And Alpha sort of claimed a median score of ninety two point five across all targets.
That's why there's a lot of hype. Now, if Om's right, if you want to delve down and look at the armis, the root mean squared deviation,
how different it is when you superimpose one of the predictions on the target, then.
Yeah, about 50 percent of the time across all atoms. This is you can get on that.
They're under two angstroms, which is what Yvonne was mentioning,
which is still pretty impressive actually, if you make your toddler a little bit slacker.
So less than five angstroms, then 92 and a half percent of the time they get the right answer, which which is quite impressive.
And I think there's scope for improving that. Actually, that's the good news as well.
I think actually, it's not clear whether you could refine that a little bit, making that bit of physics and perhaps do it to improve the models.
And it's not also clear whether some of that difference reflects some of the crystallisation artefacts or some,
so that there's a lot of things that one one could probably delve down to a little bit and consider that consider it a bit more detail, I think.
I think the level of accuracy is useful enough even now, though,
that you might even start to question some experimental results you might be thinking of.
Is it really also worth the experiment? Right.
And then I read on somebody's blog and apologies if you are listening and I'm quoting you from misquoting you here.
But I didn't read it. Actually, that's already happened.
One of the experimental groups had seen the results on the outfall, went back and looked at that data.
And indeed, they have actually mis assigned probably residue.
I think it was so. Yeah.
So. So, yeah, I read I read that blog. So I thought that was a good idea.
That actually now we're at the level where we're actually using the computational predictions to question whether the experiment itself is right.
I think he's very that's an important step change, actually.
I think going forward, it would probably be better for the predictors to compare to the raw electron density, actually, rather than.
Yeah. Will that make Chris Lawrence generate the great theoretical ecologist?
Bob May. Lord May. He died early this year. You still have to quit.
My theory completely disproves your data. And I'm sorry he's not alive.
Enjoy. That's what I would like to go to some questions.
And the first one, I think it's for Yvonne. And this Sunesys has alpha fold.
Is it likely to facilitate or replace crystallography? And how do you think it will become incorporated into the drug design pipeline?
Right. Okay. I think for the moment, anyway,
it's just going to be incredibly complementary and helpful to breaking crystallography and also to to Criolla n that preaching crystallography.
We we often benefit from having a model that we can start from.
That might not be the exact isn't the exact structure that we're trying to determine.
But it gives us a starting point that allows us to interpret our data more rapidly and if we can.
Get those models using alpha fold.
That that could be incredibly helpful. It could also, I think.
Be used to generate structures for individual proteins, which you could then dock together into complexes that we are visualising,
using criterium, which may actually be at a rather lower resolution to rather less detail.
We might not be able to see quite all of the detail in.
Using some of our structural techniques, looking at really big complexes,
it's often very useful to be able to get really detailed structures of maller parts
of those complexes and then dock them into less detailed experimental structures.
And I think that's that could be a very important way forward. That term Alpha Fold is able to open up for us in terms of the drug design.
Yeah, I kind of touched on that earlier, didn't I? I think it is going to be very exciting in probably the only the short term, actually,
that they are going to improve, because I didn't mean to sound too churlish. I think they it's it's incredibly exciting what they're doing already.
Thanks very much. That question was from you. Can the law, I should have said.
I've got a question from Larissa goal, which I think is fullfil machine learning is only as good as the data on which it is trained, trained.
And if there are biases and that's going to affect it. Are you aware of any such biases, biases in the training set?
And if I can expand that. Does this mean that you can't take, say,
a very novel peptide sequence from a poorly understood virus and and feed it into deep fault if it's seen nothing like that in the past?
Yeah. So that's a very good point. And yeah, that is very true.
Machine learning is traditionally only as good as the data you put in.
And there's of course, there is a bias in in in some sense in, for example,
the PDP in those structures that are readily solvable by by definition, almost, because that's what the PDP.
So there is a slight bias there. Now, if you'd asked me the question about alcohol won,
then then I would have said yes to to to Charles's follow up question would would
it would have really struggled to predict something that it's never seen before, but would Alpha fold to the jury is a bit out, I think on this.
It's not clear how well it would actually do on unrelated things.
I think that would be the interest.
A very interesting to see how it does on on stuff that it clearly has no idea about that and ask it to make a prediction on that.
I think that will be an interesting test. I don't think anybody has a feeling for how badly if you're a pessimist or how
well you're not missed how well it will world will do in that kind of scenario.
But certainly a machine learning the input data of the data set that you have for training for some of these things is super important.
And yeah, you have to be aware all the time of biases. Yeah. Okay.
The next question is for Yvonne. And if I'm going to ask you to actually explain the question as well as to answer it.
What are these? What do we think about whether Alpha Fold will be able to solve the structures for G protein coupled receptors,
seeing as they're so hard to crystallise? So might you begin by just saying what the G protein coupled receptor?
It's okay. It's it's a protein, that's all.
A family of huge family protein, huge family proteins that are embedded in the plasma membrane that the membranes that surround ourselves.
So they are proteins that are involved in picking up signals from the outside and signalling into the cell.
And they are major drug targets. Many of these these proteins, because they control all sorts of signalling, not in our brains, for example.
So they they can be they can be targets fully and anti-depressants and such like they can.
But they they control the.
Your activities in our hearts and there are many, many, many of these family members are very potent drug targets.
And for many, many years, people have worked to get structures, effort to understand and to design better drugs against them.
To understand the actions of the drugs we've got and to sign better ones.
But they have proved to be notoriously difficult to crystallise.
And indeed, a clutch of Nobel prises were awarded not that long ago for the very first structures that came out.
And the first structures were by approaching crystallography. But they they needed new techniques to be used to persuade these things to crystallise.
More recently, there's been quite a lot of progress being made with using criterium to solve structures that these proteins.
And so. Yes, that they're a reasonable number of family members now for which structures are known.
But as I was saying, there are many, many, many members in this family, many hundreds protein's for which we don't have structures.
And so the argument would be that indeed we could use the alpha fold to predict these structures.
And it could. One would hope it would do. Perhaps better than than just starting from a known structure and trying to model from that structure.
But I'm since the devil is in the detail, I don't know.
I don't. I hope it's going to help us. But I don't know how well our phone is working at the moment for these highly membrane embedded type proteins.
And also the problem with G protein receptors. And part of the reason why they've been very problematic to crystallise is that they.
Part of their function involves them being very dynamic, so they they shape change, look huge by a huge amount,
but they do shape change a bit and that's important for the way that they work and they interact with other proteins.
As part of that, they pass on the signal to other proteins through their shape change.
And there's a movement so it doesn't work, doesn't tell you you shape changes and doesn't tell you Pruett's in protein interactions and the,
you know, the deep mind people in that in their block, in their in their presence.
What we're seeing these are the next are the challenges that they're going to have to move onto in the longer term.
Phil, you've already asked around about things that will be a use for for drug designs to look for a bridge.
Do you see cars that are going to be perhaps not easily solved of them?
You know, I was just gonna say one of the yeah, that is definitely one of the challenges for other other membrane proteins like transporters.
You know, we know they don't have one unique structure.
They actually have at least two probably more set separate structures that must be Matus stable as part of their part of their function.
And so which one do you predict? You know, so I won't be challenging for alcohol, too, I think,
to predict the different states of transporter proteins or things like PCR, which can exist in multiple different confirmations.
I think transporter's might be a bit easier because that changes are probably a bit more extreme.
So you would think perhaps that that might be a little bit easier G.P.S.
So the movement is quite subtle, actually. Most of them, at least anyway.
But isn't this a problem that's perhaps amenable to the next generation of machine learning in this area that you can.
You do understand these metho stable states so the states that flit between it,
then you can train a A.I. to try and learn that and hopefully tell you new things.
Yeah, I think I think you're right. I think that is actually that.
And the problem legalisation are actually relatively low hanging fruit now in the sense that, you know,
they've done the big problem, which is basically protecting the structure of the give or take lives.
And actually, you know, to to extend that in these other directions, you would kind of think it's not so hard.
Is that the first step? You know, these be second and third steps we're talking about now, I would think would be a little bit less difficult.
But I don't know, maybe it's just then just a follow up question to that.
My friends who work on Glycoprotein is always say that the amino acid sequence
is only the beginning and they see the things you stick to your protein off.
You made it. That give all the activity. Then how does how does that affect what we're talking about now?
Yeah, I suppose what we would call post translational modifications. You're right.
I mean, one of the approaches that I'm really interested in, which is one of the messenger proteins that goes between cells,
it isn't just made out of the beads on the string,
but it's it's also got an extra parmeter late attached to it, which is essential for its its its activity.
So it's it's got a it's not just entirely made of amino acids.
There are other things that add onto proteins that further change,
add to their shape and add to their properties and are essential for their function.
And so there's a whole world there. That Alpha vote isn't exploring.
OK. We've got a few more questions. And so, if possible and I realise it might be a if you can answer them quite briefly.
I don't know who would like to pick this one up, which is the highest vote at the moment.
And we'll need a bit of explanation. How long do you expect before Alpha Fold is going to be capable of predicting hysteric interactions?
So you can. Failed you? Yes.
How long before it predicts, Alastair, it interactions? Just to clarify, Alex.
Derek InterAction's meaning that there would be another part of the protein away from perhaps where the agonist binds,
or that the main leg and binding side is another side or the other Sterrett side.
Which would. Which would. Which would be. Somewhere where something else could buy it and do something.
How old. How far are we away from understanding that? I think that's the thing.
That's a particularly challenging sub problem of when you get down to higher accuracy.
So, you know, I said earlier that 50 percent of the results were under two Angstroms or Mesta.
I think you'd have to be confident the other, you know,
much higher and 50 percent before you could begin to hope to to to sort of tackle that particular question.
All right. Sorry, fella. I interrupted. No, no, I just said that that would be my view.
Yeah. Am I right? The significance of the question is that were you to understand hysteric interactions that new new drug targets,
because you could then look at small molecules that would then.
Exactly. Yeah. It so that the benefit.
Looking at our Starick sites in that way would be that you'd be not looking at the same site as the author Sterrett Ligand.
And that would give you more freedom presumably to to design something new that they didn't have the.
There wouldn't be so constrained as the authors of the authors,
Darkside tends to be constrained by all of the evolutionary properties that are designed to make it the main orthostatic site.
But the historic site presumably can be a bit more freer in terms of how it's evolved and that there could be
potential for many more different compounds to bind and change the activation or otherwise of the target protein.
So it's an interesting question.
Here is what are your understanding of how Alpha file deals with nonsense sequences are completely fictional sequences?
So I guess there are two issues here. If you may comp a string of amino acids.
Will it always assume a fixed three dimensional structure or is it only a subset of sequences that form a structure?
We know that it's only a subset because because there are proteins that the cells make that term that are the don't assume one fixed structure,
and that's part of that function, actually, that they they can shape change and partly according to to what they're.
What are the proteins are interacting with, but also there are regions in them that are just very,
very flexible and floppy and just stay like beads on a string. I mean, Phil, what would you say to that?
Yeah, no, I absolutely I think I if that's the intention of the question, I say, but yeah, you know, there are a lot of it.
The genome is probably unstructured. So that not be different question then and probably not relevant.
Right. I think it does come to can you then turn it the other way around, though, and start to design structures?
So so run it backwards and say, OK. This is the structure that I want.
Can I kind of work out what the sequence would have to be?
To get that structure, because that's how you would then design it.
Enzymes to order, little machines that would chew up plastic. I think they've been saying a lot in the press releases.
You could say that that is something that already David Baker has been putting a lot of effort into.
This is somebody else who's been looking at protein coding problem over the area over the years.
And clearly, it's a direction that deep, so deep mind and announce folder without the filter can be interested in protecting well.
So that nicely leads on to my last question.
We've only got three minutes left, and I want you to throw us aside your shackles as some very careful scientists to sort of project yourself
10 years in the future and give us an example of what you think might be a really interesting result,
either in fundamental science or in medicine or applied science that will come out of both what our four fold has done.
But the whole tenor in advance of of protein biochemistry.
So I am asking you to to unashamedly speculate about if everything went well,
what might be a fantastic thing that we're celebrating 10 years from now.
Horrible question. So I'll go to Phil first, right. Very gentlemanly.
So. Well, I think, you know, you could use it progresses as fast as less than one can imagine that you'll have structures for everything.
And in that case, he structures ever want or need to have structures for things like structural systems,
biology, whatever you want to call it, will become a reality. And I think that's one important thing,
because that could actually then bring know how we unify a lot of cellular level stuff all the way down to molecular.
So we really, really will have a very good, detailed structural understanding right away from molecules,
right up to cells genuinely with no gaps in it.
Totally understanding how all these things start to interact and function together, that that is not an unrealistic goal.
I don't think,
given the progress in the last two casts in that sense and what were the ideas we discussed about interactions between different proteins,
that that obviously is the next one of the next big challenges is predicting how all these proteins will interact with each other,
both in space and time within a cell. So that that that, if you like, is is is what you could aim for probably within 10 years.
That really is exciting, Yvonne. Yeah.
And running from that. Carrying on from there.
I think what would also be incredibly exciting is going to be the ability to to understand then the effect of.
A variance in in in the genome of a single point mutations.
Just one person having one different coloured bead in the string of one of their proteins is alpha fold.
Gonna be able to help us more rapidly understand the effect of that colour change of just one in one bead affecting the shape of a protein
and affecting the way that it interacts with all the other proteins it needs to to talk to in a cell to go back to to Phil's answer.
So will it ultimately help us understand all the information that's now being gathered from the sequencing of the human genome?
And help us to translate that ultimately into medicines if we can understand better what's going wrong,
ongoing, wrong, maybe because of just one very subtle change. Will we be able to then come up more easily with.
Where to intervene therapeutically? Thanks so much indeed.
I'm really sorry we're going to have to come to an end.
Now, it has been a real privilege to listen to and discuss with two of the leading experts in this field.
The exciting result that we had last year, last week.
And if I'm sort of to paraphrase the discussion, much of the hype has been justified.
But there is some real details that one needs to think about there.
Just before thanking you, I'd like to thank everyone who has tuned in.
And also the many questions and do forgive me when I've not been able to come to your questions.
We're not stopping for the holiday break, but do look at the Martin School Web site.
We'll be announcing some more virtual conversations in the new year.
And let me finish by thanking both Phil and Yvonne. Yvonne, you've done magnificently, given that you've had to do this completely blind.
Whereas Philon, I can sort of see each other's movements. So I'm sorry we had this technical.
I'm very sorry. Is beginning to be a woman of mystery. But it's been a lovely hearing, the two of you.
Your voices. And it's been great fun. And it's a it is a very exciting time.
Thank you very much. So thank felon Yvonne very much indeed for taking part.
And goodbye, everyone.