Video by lumiere_edu

Here's a biology research project you can do from your laptop and a free tool built by Nobel Prize winners. In 2024, scientists won the Nobel Prize for teaching AI to build proteins from scratch. The tool designs brand new proteins that could become drugs, vaccines, or materials that have never existed before. The tool is called RF Diffusion. It's free and it runs in your browser.

You tell it what you want, say a protein shape to grab onto a specific target. Then the AI builds a 3D structure that exists nowhere in nature. Next, you run a second free tool called AlphaFold. It predicts whether your design would actually hold that shape in real life, and it gives you a score.

The high scores of designs worth making in a lab. Obviously, real research is more complicated than this, so if you want the full breakdown, follow my account and comment Protein, and I'll send it over.