The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their computer-aided design of proteins and their predicted structure. The announcement ceremony can be watched live on the Nobel Committee 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 from the University of Washington. In 2003, he published a paper on the synthesis of a protein that has no analogues in nature. For the design, Baker used the Rosetta program, which predicted the amino acid sequence of a protein based on its three-dimensional structure. Chemists synthesized this sequence in the lab and obtained an artificial protein as a result. It later turned out that this method can be used to create proteins that bind to pre-selected ligands. Baker also managed to synthesize several unnatural enzymes that catalyze reactions of retro-aldol condensation and isoxazole opening. Subsequently, the approach Baker founded became known as de novo protein design.
The other half of the prize will be shared by the developers of the AlphaFold algorithm, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. Hassabis founded DeepMind, which developed a program for predicting protein structure based on its amino acid sequence. In 2018, his team won the CASP international competition for structural modeling of proteins. The AlphaFold machine learning algorithm developed by Hassabis made it possible to predict three-dimensional protein structures with record accuracy: the structures found coincided with those obtained experimentally by about 60 percent.
And in 2020, Hassabis, together with John Jumper, who joined the development team, presented the second version of the AlphaFold 2 algorithm at the competition. It did even better: the structures were practically indistinguishable from those obtained by laborious X-ray structural analysis. Thus, the scientists managed to solve 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 on Protein Grounds”.
This year, Clarivate's prediction came true: the laureates were on their list of the most cited scientists. They also included Kazunari Doman, a researcher of photocatalytic water splitting. And in third place were Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello. They developed one of the most popular methods for calculating molecular dynamics. You can read more about the candidates for other prizes this year in the text "The Queue for the Nobel".
In 2023, three scientists became Nobel laureates: Mungi Bawendi, Louis Bruce and Alexey Ekimov. They received the prize for the discovery and research of quantum dots - crystalline semiconductor particles several nanometers in size. We told more about what each of the laureates did in the text "Schrödinger on TV".
In 2022, the prize was shared by Caroline Bertozzi, Morten Meldahl and Barry Sharpless. They were developing 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 used them to study cell membranes in our article “Click and Done.”