The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024: what the discoveries of scientists mean. Explanation by one of the best teachers in Ukraine

On October 7, Nobel Week kicked off with the announcement of this year's winners in chemistry. American David Baker, Briton Demis Gassabis, and American John M. Jumpen received the prestigious prize for their discoveries in protein research.

One of the best teachers in Ukraine explained what the Nobel laureates' discoveries mean for us today. The teacher also told us what impact this research will have on the future, Osvitoria writes.

To understand the discoveries of this year's Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, Larysa Romanyshyn, a teacher of chemistry, physics, and biology from Lviv region, suggested that in the future we will be able to create proteins that can recognize and destroy cancer cells or decompose plastic waste and clean up polluted water bodies.

"Thanks to new methods of predicting protein structures, medical science can gain new tools to fight diseases such as AIDS, COVID-19, or other viral infections. This can lead to real revolutions in medicine and ecology," emphasized the teacher, who won the Chemistry Teacher nomination at the Global Teacher Prize Ukraine 2024.

Larysa Romanyshyn emphasizes that the development of new proteins creates opportunities not only for science but also for business. "Companies can use them to create innovative products, such as biofuels or food. This can become the basis for new startups and business models," she says.

One of the three Nobel Prize winners, David Baker, first created a protein that did not exist in nature in 2003. Since then, his team has developed many innovative protein structures for drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials, and even small sensors.

In 2020, two of his colleagues, Demis Gassabis and John Jumper, invented AlphaFold2, an artificial intelligence that learned to predict the structure of proteins and how they would fold into three-dimensional shapes. Using this AI model, the scientists were able to predict the structures of almost all of the 200 million proteins known to science.

"They have developed a new model that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict protein structures. This means that now scientists can create new proteins that did not exist in nature before and predict exactly what they will look like," said Larysa Romanyshyn.

According to scientists, proteins are biopolymers that perform many important functions in our body. Cells are built of them, they act as enzymes that accelerate chemical reactions and even participate in disease protection. And it is their structure that determines how they function.

"It's like a key and a lock: only the right key can open the lock. If the structure of the protein is wrong, it will not be able to fulfill its function," the Ukrainian teacher added.

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