AlphaFold

ESMC is the latest in the ESM family of protein language models, establishing a new frontier in representation learning for protein biology. Trained on billions of evolutionary sequences, it learns representations that reflect a mechanistic reduction of protein structure and function. The model is built on a transformer architecture, supports sequences as its core modality, and is trained on up to 6 billion proteins. ESMC is designed for protein science research, including structure prediction, function annotation, protein design, and understanding evolutionary relationships between proteins. It can generate novel proteins from partial sequence, structure, or functional constraints, helping researchers explore new possibilities in protein design and biological discovery. The Biohub Platform provides access to ESMC through the API and the ESM Python package, with quickstart resources for installing the package, creating an API key, connecting to the platform.

ESMFold shows how AI can give us new tools to understand the natural world, much like the microscope, which enabled us to see into the world at an infinitesimal scale and opened up a whole new understanding of life. AI can help us understand the immense scope of natural diversity, and see biology in a new way. Much of AI research has focused on helping computers understand the world in a way similar to how humans do. The language of proteins is one that is beyond human comprehension and has eluded even the most powerful computational tools. AI has the potential to open up this language to our understanding. Studying AI in new domains such as biology can also give insight into artificial intelligence more broadly. Our work reveals connections across domains: large language models that are behind advances in machine translation, natural language understanding, speech recognition, and image generation are also able to learn deep information about biology.