The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their work in computational design and structure prediction of proteins. The award ceremony can be watched live on the Nobel Committee's website. The official press release provides more details about the scientists' research. The award ceremony will take place on December 10 in Stockholm.
This year's prize was awarded for two different discoveries. The first half of the prize will go to David Baker of the University of Washington. In 2003, he published a paper on the synthesis of a protein with no analogue in nature. For his design, Baker used the Rosetta program, which predicted the amino acid sequence of a protein based on its three-dimensional structure. Chemists then synthesized this sequence in the laboratory, producing an artificial protein. It was later discovered that this method could be used to create proteins that bind to pre-selected ligands. Baker also succeeded in synthesizing several unnatural enzymes that catalyze retro-aldol condensation and isoxazole opening reactions. Baker's approach subsequently became known as de novo protein design.
The other half of the prize will be shared by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, developers of the AlphaFold algorithm. Hassabis founded DeepMind, which developed software for predicting protein structure from its amino acid sequence. In 2018, his team won the CASP international competition for protein structural modeling. Hassabis's machine learning algorithm, AlphaFold, predicted three-dimensional protein structures with record accuracy: the resulting structures matched experimentally obtained structures by approximately 60 percent.
In 2020, Hassabis, along with John Jumper, who had joined the development team, presented the second version of the AlphaFold 2 algorithm at a competition. It performed even better: the structures were virtually indistinguishable from those obtained through labor-intensive X-ray crystallography. Thus, the scientists succeeded in solving one of the most important problems in biochemistry: they learned to reliably predict protein structures based on their amino acid sequence. You can read more about how AlphaFold works in our article "Fortune Telling with Protein Grounds."
This year, Clarivate's prediction came true: the laureates appeared on their list of the most cited scientists. They also made the list, along with Kazunari Dohman, a researcher on photocatalytic water splitting. Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello, who developed one of the most popular methods for calculating molecular dynamics, ranked third. You can read more about this year's other nominees in the article "The Queue for the Nobel Prize."
In 2023, three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize: Moungi Bawendi, Louis Bruce, and Alexey Ekimov. They received the prize for their discovery and research of quantum dots—crystalline semiconductor particles measuring a few nanometers. We covered each laureate's work in more detail in the article "Schrödinger on TV."
In 2022, the prize was shared by Caroline Bertozzi, Morten Møldahl, and Barry Sharpless. They developed click reactions—organic transformations that occur with very high yields and do not require complex experimental techniques. You can read about how the laureates first discovered click reactions and then applied them to study cell membranes in our article "Click and Done."
