Five years after AlphaFold 2’s debut, DeepMind’s protein-structure AI has become integral to biochemical research and graduate training, scientists say. The model’s accuracy in predicting protein folds is now taught widely in graduate programs, accelerating drug discovery, environmental science and crop research by reducing reliance on costly lab structure determination. Researchers and institutions report that AlphaFold has shifted curriculum and lab priorities, making computational structural biology a standard skill for new molecular biologists. Universities will need to expand computing resources, cross-disciplinary training and partnerships to sustain the technology’s research throughput.