How AI Cracked the Protein Folding Code and Won a Nobel Prize

3-Second Blueprint (English)

1. Amino acid chains fold into low-energy alpha helices, beta sheets, and 3D tertiary shapes that govern biological function.
2. AlphaFold2's Evoformer applies self-attention across evolutionary sequence alignments and pairwise spatial distance matrices.
3. The Structure transformer iteratively refines 3D atomic coordinates with confidence scores, earning the 2024 Chemistry Nobel.