AlphaFold and the demon-duck of doom - Google DeepMind

The DNA in these eggshells was never going to survive 50,000 years in the hot sands of the Australian desert. So, the researchers turned to proteins and AlphaFold, to help fill in the gaps.
AlphaFold is an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.
It took a genuinely multidisciplinary team including specialists in palaeoproteomics, bird genetics, archaeology and more to crack the eggshell code and answer the question of what led to the demise of the thunderbird.
Links and further reading:
Find more AlphaFold stories at dpmd.ai/3OsyZVj
Read the full paper by Beatrice, Josefin, Matthew and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
Access the AlphaFold database dpmd.ai/3DrQkY7
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[@ooooneeee]

This is a game changer. Paleoproteomics of fossils could allow us to look back into the past much farther than DNA sequencing 😍.

[@ashutoshsharma9989]

So Intriguing!! Amazing!!

[@LoisSharbel]

Demis Hassabis and his team and backers are opening up new landscapes of knowledge. Hurray for DeepMind! What a gift to humanity!

[@joseortiz_io]

Amazing. AlphaFold sure is a gift to the scientific community. Can’t wait to see what DeepMind develops in the future to help advance science ❤

[@speedfastman]

You sound like you wait for evolution to plant presents under your sciencemas tree. 🙄

[@joseortiz_io]

@@speedfastman Hahahaha!

[@malikfaisal7679]

Always fascinated by the discoveries of Deepmind.....

[@kabir09999]

Does that mean the better the technology, the farther we can look into the past!!! ❤
I wish I worked at AlphaFold ❤️

[@craiglee3253]

So... it took AI for them to know that a very big egg was laid by a very big animal?

[@user-zf4kn2qs5j]

Database. Opensource?

[@mexicanmax227]

If normal people knew how hard I needed out on this stuff 😂🥰

[@johannes-7710]

So that means dinosaur birds lived with humans?

[@z-beeblebrox]

They live with us now! What do you think a chicken is?

[@lolerie]

Birds are dinosours. Sigh.

[@1.4142]

Was the bird big?

[@aussiemal7695]

G'day. I've never learnt anything about these birds at school here in Melbourne. To me they look like the size of emu eggs. I really find this hard to believe and as you can see I'm from Australia and I'm a 58 year old male. These days we really have to question everything we've been taught at school. Just look at the last 2 years. A virus is now called a disease and last year an experimental medical procedure was mandated. Look at what's happening this year with all the new reasons for heart attacks and other health problems happening.

[@victoriamarshall2342]

Your not wrong

[@DanFrederiksen]

How damaged is the dna if you look at the atomic level, are there remaining nano structures that could be pieced together to a full genome?

[@Mavrik9000]

DNA is an incredibly long linear sequence of small molecules called nucleotides. There are only four nucleotides: Adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). Whole DNA strands are made of millions of nucleotides in various patterns. Such as ACGTGACTCGATGC... continuing on at lengths that a single person couldn't count in their lifetime.
The sequences of patterns are the information used to make the huge array of proteins in your body. It is the order and patterns of the sequences that are important. Once the long strands of DNA are degraded, by being broken apart, to a certain degree there isn't a way to put them back together in the proper order. So looking at the smaller structures of the nucleotides, or the sequences of the small broken pieces of DNA doesn't provide enough information about the order that they were originally in.

[@lolerie]

@@Mavrik9000 unless you multiply your DNA many times and then cut it and that is how human genome was fulky sequenced in 2022.

[@Mavrik9000]

@@lolerie The human DNA in that project was not damaged or degraded prior to the process.

[@lolerie]

@@Mavrik9000 here they do not even use DNA, but directly proteins.

[@Mavrik9000]

@@lolerie Yes, you are correct. That is the topic of the video.

[@CyberDocUSA]

Leggo my Eggo, yo.

[@protowarefuzz5894]

Question: how is the status with A.G.I

[@spinvalve]

So Alphafold helped these three humans figure out that their ancestors loved to eat giant bird eggs. Got it.

[@dangibbo]

* Unfeld

[@sudokucoach]

You sure have a lot of dead birds hoarded. 😀