Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome

Protein structures can provide invaluable information, both for reasoning about biological processes and for enabling interventions such as structure-based drug development or targeted mutagenesis. After decades of effort, 17% of the total residues in human protein sequences are covered by an experimentally-determined structure1. Here we dramatically expand structural coverage by applying the state-of-the-art machine learning method, AlphaFold2, at scale to almost the entire human proteome (98.5% of human proteins). The resulting dataset covers 58% of residues with a confident prediction, of which a subset (36% of all residues) have very high confidence. We introduce several metrics developed by building on the AlphaFold model, and use them to interpret the dataset, identifying strong multi-domain predictions as well as regions likely to be disordered. Finally, we provide some case studies illustrating how high-quality predictions may be used to generate biological hypotheses. Importantly, we are making our predictions freely available to the community via a public database (hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute at https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/ ). We anticipate that routine large-scale and high-accuracy structure prediction will become an important tool, allowing new questions to be addressed from a structural perspective.