Microsoft’s new AI system, Biomolecular Emulator-1 (BioEmu-1), will help decode protein motion and help in the faster discovery of drugs. BioEmu-1 is a deep learning model that can generate thousands of protein structures per hour on a single graphics processing unit (GPU).

Proteins play an essential role – from forming muscle fibres to protecting against diseases – in almost all biological processes in both humans and other life forms.

While recent years have seen progress in better understanding of protein structures, predicting a single protein structure from its amino acid sequence was not feasible.But, with BioEmu-1, scientists can get a deeper understanding of how proteins work – critical for designing more effective drugs.