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Unexpected Elements

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

The news you know, the science you don’t.

The news you know, the science you don’t. Unexpected Elements looks beyond everyday narratives to discover a goldmine of scientific stories and connections from around the globe. From Afronauts, to why we argue, to a deep dive on animal lifespans: see the world in a new way.

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Unexpected Elements: Your molecular machinery, now in 3D

Discussion & Talk

Protein folding

24/07/2021 GMT

Your molecular machinery, now in 3D

BBC World Service - Unexpected Elements, Your molecular machinery, now in 3D

DeepMind publishes 350,000 of the structures which make all living things tick.

DeepMind publishes 350,000 of the molecular structures which make all living things tick. Plus, Covid-19 vaccination strategy reimagined, the seismic sensitivities of elephants.

Back in November it was announced that an AI company called DeepMind had near enough cracked the problem of protein folding - that is they had managed to successfully predict the 3D structures of complex biochemical molecules by only knowing the 2D sequence of amino acids from which they are made. 

They are not the only team to use machine learning to approach the vast amounts of data involved. But only last week, they released the source code and methodology behind their so called AlphaFold 2 tool for free. And today they have published, via a paper in the journal Nature, a simply huge database of predicted structures including most of the human proteome, and 20 other model species such as yeast and mice. The possibilities for any biochemists are very exciting. 

As DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tells Roland Pease, they partnered with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to make over 350,000 of these protein predictions available to researchers around the world free of charge and open-sourced. Dr Benjamin Perry of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative told us how it may help in the search for urgently needed drugs for difficult illnesses such as Chagas disease. Prof John McGeehan of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at Portsmouth University in the UK is on the search for enzymes that might be used to digest otherwise pollutant plastics. He received results (that would have taken years using more traditional methods) back from the AlphaFold team in just a couple of days. 

Prof Julia Gog of Cambridge University is a biomathematician who has been modelling Covid epidemiology and behaviour. In a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science, she and colleagues wonder whether the vaccination strategy of jabbing the most vulnerable in a population first, rather than the most gregarious or mobile, is necessarily the optimal way to protect them. Should nations still at an early stage in vaccine rollout consider her model? 

And did you know that elephants can hear things up to a kilometre away through their feet? And that sometimes they communicate by bellowing and rumbling such that the ground shakes? Dr Beth Mortimer of Oxford University has been planting seismic detectors in savannah in Kenya to see if they can tap into the elephant messaging network, to possibly help conservationists track their movements.

Also, One listener finds herself unconcerned about much of the world’s problems, it leaves her wondering: am I a psychopath? Inspired by a previous episode on empathy, this listener asked is it true that psychopaths don’t empathise and what are the character traits of psychopathy? 

Marnie Chesterton talks with a diagnosed pro-social psychopath to find out. She also pays a visit to the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and gets into an MRI scanner to discover what is happening in her brain when she empathises. 

Studies suggest around 1 percent of the general population exhibit traits associated with psychopathy and that rises to 3-4 percent in the world of business. But is this really the case? Why is there so much stigma associated with psychopathy and do psychopaths even exist or is it just a convenient term to label those whose emotional range sits outside of the “norm”? Presented by Marnie Chesterton and produced by Caroline Steel for the BBC World Service. Guests: Julia Shaw Jim Fallon Valeria Gazzola Kalliopi Ioumpa

Image: Protein folding
Credit: Nicolas_/iStock/Getty Images

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Your molecular machinery, now in 3D

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