Duration: 30 minutes
Max. Number of Students: 20
Summary:
Have you ever wondered how life arises in our body or why some drugs work like a precisely ground key in a lock? The answer lies in the shape of proteins. These microscopic machines do all the work in our cells, but their structure has been an unsolvable puzzle for scientists for decades.
In this workshop, we will take a look behind the scenes of the revolution that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. We will show how artificial intelligence has achieved what took humans years (AlphaFold), and how today we design tailor-made drugs thanks to it.
What will you try in practice? We will not just stay with theory – for a moment you will become a structural biologist. You will enter the digital world of molecules, where you will visualize real proteins yourself and search for typical architectural patterns (folds) that nature uses in their construction. In the final mission, we will look at a specific interaction of a protein with a ligand.