David Baker. (Image by University of Washington.)
Nobel Prize winner conducted protein folding research at Argonne user facilities
David Baker, a longtime user of the ALCF and the APS at Argonne, is one of three recipients of the chemistry prize for 2024.
The scientist awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computer software to invent a new protein used supercomputers and ultrabright X-rays at two facilities located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. David Baker, a University of Washington professor of biochemistry and head of the Institute for Protein Design, shared the prize with Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind.
Baker’s pioneering research focuses on understanding how chains of amino acids fold into functional proteins, a process essential to all life. Accurate computer models of this process are crucial for deciphering how proteins work and how misfolded proteins can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
For more than a decade, Baker leveraged the computational power of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility, through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This access allowed him to perform complex simulations of protein structures, contributing to significant breakthroughs in understanding protein behavior.
Baker has also been a user of multiple beamlines at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), one of the premier X-ray light sources in the world, for more than 10 years. Baker’s experiments have centered around using the extraordinarily bright X-ray beams of the APS to obtain structures of proteins designed on supercomputers, to verify their characteristics. The APS is also a DOE Office of Science user facility. John M. Jumper was also a user of the APS, conducting research between 2017 and 2022 on proteins and RNA.
Baker developed Rosetta, an open-source software suite that hundreds of labs worldwide now use to predict and design protein structures. He and his team also have developed new protein folds and have designed and built functional enzymes and engineered protein interactions that previously did not exist in nature.
Baker’s research, supported by user facilities at Argonne and other DOE national laboratories, has made significant advancements toward developing novel therapeutics that one day may enable drug developers to create treatments that precisely target specific disease-causing molecules within the body.
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
