The Protein Folding Problem

It is estimated that there are over 200 million proteins across all species in nature. (Source)

As of 2025, only about 174,000 protein structures have been solved and deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). (Source)

This massive gap between known sequences and solved structures is known as the protein folding problem.

AlphaFold addresses this problem using AI to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences — at scale and with high accuracy.