AI-predicted protein structures for thousands of viruses added to AlphaFold database

Think of protein structures as the blueprints of biology. If you want to build a drug that stops a virus, you first need to understand the shape of the lock you’re trying to jam. Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) just handed researchers the keys to roughly 2,812 viral proteomes worth of those blueprints, all predicted by AI and all freely available. The update to the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, released in March 2026, adds approximately 1.7 to 1.8 million high-confidence protein complex predictions. The focus this time: viruses, and the goal of giving scientists a head start before the next pandemic arrives rather than after. What’s actually in the database The numbers here are staggering when you consider the baseline. A companion dataset called Viro3D provides over 85,000 high-quality predicted structures spanning more than 4,400 viruses. That expands the representation of viral proteins in the database by roughly 30-fold compared to existing experimental data. The release includes 5,279 high-confidence heterodimers, which are complexes formed by two different protein chains, and 2,749 h...