{"id":151355,"date":"2022-11-28T21:27:17","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T03:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/predicting-the-structures-of-proteins"},"modified":"2022-11-28T21:27:17","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T03:27:17","slug":"predicting-the-structures-of-proteins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/predicting-the-structures-of-proteins","title":{"rendered":"Predicting the Structures of Proteins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/predicting-the-structures-of-proteins.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool grew up surrounded by scientific activities carried out at home by her mother\u2014who went to university a few years after Tunyasuvunakool was born. One day a pendulum hung from a ceiling in her family\u2019s home, Tunyasuvunakool\u2019s mother standing next to it, timing the swings for a science assignment. Another day, fossil samples littered the dining table, her mother scrutinizing their patterns for a report. This early exposure to science imbued Tunyasuvunakool with the idea that science was fun and that having a career in science was an attainable goal. \u201cFrom early on I was desperate to go to university and be a scientist,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>Tunyasuvunakool fulfilled that ambition, studying math as an undergraduate, and computational biology as a graduate student. During her PhD work she helped create a model that captured various elements of the development of a soil-inhabiting roundworm called <i>Caenorhabditis elegans<\/i>, a popular organism for both biologists and physicists to study. She also developed a love for programming, which, she says, lent itself naturally to a jump into software engineering. Today Tunyasuvunakool is part of the team behind DeepMind\u2019s AlphaFold\u2014a protein-structure-prediction tool. <i><i>Physics<\/i> Magazine<\/i> spoke to her to find out more about this software, which recently won two of its makers a Breakthrough Prize, and about why she\u2019s excited for the potential discoveries it could enable.<\/p>\n<p>All interviews are edited for brevity and clarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool grew up surrounded by scientific activities carried out at home by her mother\u2014who went to university a few years after Tunyasuvunakool was born. One day a pendulum hung from a ceiling in her family\u2019s home, Tunyasuvunakool\u2019s mother standing next to it, timing the swings for a science assignment. Another day, fossil samples littered [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,3,2229,219,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biological","category-mathematics","category-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}