Artificial intelligence has surpassed the limits of scientific knowledge by predicting the shape of almost every known protein, a breakthrough that will significantly accelerate the time required to make biological discoveries.

The research was done by London-based AI company DeepMind — owned by Google parent Alphabet — which used its AlphaFold algorithm to build the most complete and accurate database yet of the more than 200mn known proteins.

Prediction of a protein’s structure from its DNA sequence alone has been one of biology’s greatest challenges. Current experimental methods to determine the shape of a single protein take months or years in a laboratory, which is why only about 190,000, or 0.1 per cent of known protein structures, have been solved.