Machine learning methods for protein structure prediction have taken advantage of the evolutionary information present in multiple sequence alignments to derive accurate structural information, but predicting structure accurately from a single sequence is much more difficult. Lin et al. trained transformer protein language models with up to 15 billion parameters on experimental and high-quality predicted structures and found that information about atomic-level structure emerged in the model as it was scaled up. They created ESMFold, a sequence-to-structure predictor that is nearly as accurate as alignment-based methods and considerably faster. The increased speed permitted the generation of a database, the ESM Metagenomic Atlas, containing more than 600 million metagenomic proteins