British computer scientist Professor Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "revolutionary" work on proteins, the building blocks of life.
Prof Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence company that became Google DeepMind.
Professor John Jumper, 39, who worked with Prof Hassabis on the breakthrough, shares the award along with US-based Professor David Baker, 60.
Proteins are the building blocks of life and are found in every cell in the human body.
Better understanding proteins has driven huge breakthroughs in medicine. It is used in solving antibiotic resistance and to image enzymes that can decompose plastics.
Prof Hassabis and Prof Jumper used artificial intelligence to predict the structures of almost all known proteins and created a tool called AlphaFold2.
Proteins are made of chains of building blocks called amino acids that each fold in a unique shape. Scientists had long struggled to predict the shape of each of the millions of proteins, but that structure drives what it does in the human body.
Understanding the structure is crucial to knowing how to target the protein and alter its behaviour, which is crucial in medicine,BBC reported.
The Nobel committee called AlphaFold2 a "complete revolution", and the tool is now used for 200 million proteins worldwide.
Before the pair starting working on the problem, just a tiny fraction of protein structures had been worked out.
