The Navarra Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (NAIR Center) and ONCE Foundation have signed a collaboration agreement to hire a PhD researcher to contribute to the project “Custom-designed proteins with Artificial Intelligence”.
The main objective of the agreement is to establish an alliance between both entities within the framework of the “Oportunidad al Talento” programme, an initiative promoted by ONCE Foundation and co-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF), which provides scholarships—some of them for research—to promote the academic and research careers of university students with disabilities.
Under the terms of the agreement, ONCE Foundation will help cover the salary of the successful candidate and will also pay the employer’s social-security contributions, while NAIR Center will provide all the resources necessary for the proper development of the project for at least one year, extendable for a further year upon request by the researcher and the centre.
This project forms part of one of NAIR Center’s research lines, focused on designing personalised proteins using Artificial Intelligence. Its purpose is to develop technology that makes it possible to design fully customised proteins, with the aim of creating proteins with specific functions.
Proteins are molecules that are fundamental to life, as they perform a wide variety of functions within cells, including regulating the chemical reactions that sustain cellular life. A distinctive feature of many proteins is that their three-dimensional structure—crucial to their function—depends entirely on their amino-acid sequence. Research into proteins has been of great scientific interest for decades, with efforts aimed at understanding how their amino-acid sequence determines their folding and three-dimensional structure.
Knowledge of this relationship makes it possible to design bespoke proteins that can have applications in different fields, such as creating enzymes capable of degrading plastics—an important contemporary challenge.
Specifically, this NAIR Center research project builds on the 2021 release of the Artificial Intelligence model AlphaFold, created by researchers at DeepMind, which can predict a protein’s three-dimensional structure using only its amino-acid sequence. This model has inspired numerous research groups around the world—including NAIR Center—who are already applying Artificial Intelligence to solve problems in protein design.
Source: https://www.fundaciononce.es
