The AI tool designed proteins that would bind to cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4). Credit: Molekuul/SPL The known protein universe just got a lot bigger. A newly released artificial-intelligence tool has generated an atlas of more than one billion predicted protein structures and billions more protein sequences. The database, known as the ESM Atlas, was unveiled today by researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Biohub, a biomedical institute created in San Francisco, California, by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, physician and educator Priscilla Chan. The atlas eclipses the AlphaFold database of predicted protein structures by more than 800 million entries, and a previous ESM Atlas by some 300 million. The predictions were made using ESMFold2, an AI model that Biohub says surpasses the performance of AlphaFold3, the latest version of Google DeepMind’s system, and other protein-structure prediction AIs. The atlas is described in a report released today .…