İzmir Biomedicine and Genome Center’s AF-Ensemble Project receives TÜBİTAK support
The AF-Ensemble project, conducted within the İzmir Biomedicine and Genome Center (İBG), has been selected for funding under the TÜBİTAK 2509 Program.
As one of the eight projects supported by TÜBİTAK and the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs under the 2509 France Bilateral Cooperation Support Program (Bosphorus) 2024 call, AF-Ensemble aims to explore how the AI-powered AlphaFold2 (AF2) can be used to understand the dynamic structures of protein complexes.
AF2, which was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is a revolutionary artificial intelligence system capable of predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins solely from amino acid sequences.
This international research project, carried out in collaboration between Türkiye and France, is led by Dr. Ezgi Karaca Principal Investigator at İzmir Biomedicine and Genome Center and Faculty Member at Dokuz Eylül University, along with Dr. Marc Lensink from Lille University, France. The researchers aim to determine the optimal parameters for AF2 and develop a method to predict different conformations of protein complexes.
By offering an alternative to classical Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations, the AF-Ensemble project seeks to further advance AI applications in biology, opening new possibilities in biotechnology, drug discovery, and disease research.