It doesn’t have much photogenic appeal or the glamour of seeing back in time, but a new development in computational biochemistry has been hailed as a discovery as important as the images of distant galaxies recently seen through the James Webb Space Telescope. Researchers at DeepMind—the AI company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, which developed the algorithm that can beat the best human experts at the strategic board game Go—have used an AI system they call AlphaFold to predict the shape of every protein molecule known to biological research: more than 200m of them, found in all manner of animals, plants, bacteria and other organisms.

Proteins are the molecules at the heart of life. Encoded in the DNA of every organism’s genome, they orchestrate the biochemical reactions that enable life to exist at all. AlphaFold’s predictions of their molecular structure have already been shown to be very reliable, thanks to comparisons with the structures deduced previously from comparison with corresponding structures deduced by painstaking experiments that involve bouncing X-rays off protein crystals. Because such experiments are time-consuming and indeed not always possible—they have been performed only for around 150,000-170,000 proteins so far, including less than 20 per cent of all human proteins—the sudden availability of a good guess at the structure of every known protein offers an astounding shortcut for biological research.