Zhang Yang

New Capabilities

Lead developer of D-I-TASSER protein prediction pipeline

Determining the three-dimensional shape of a single protein used to take a graduate student an entire career. In March 2026, Google DeepMind released AlphaFold 4, a system that predicts the structure of multi-protein complexes in minutes rather than hours or days, extending a streak of capability gains that began when the original AlphaFold won a protein-prediction competition in 2018. Weeks earlier, DeepMind's drug-discovery spinoff Isomorphic Labs disclosed a proprietary model called IsoDDE that more than doubles AlphaFold 3's accuracy on key drug-design benchmarks, while a team at the National University of Singapore published D-I-TASSER, a tool that outperforms both AlphaFold 2 and AlphaFold 3 on difficult multi-domain proteins.

Updated Mar 6