Why was Alphafold such a big deal? 5 years ago or whatever when it came out people acted like it was the holy grail of biology and would cure everything, but nothing seems to have changed.
>>16991543Question like this betrays a fundamental understanding of the subject matter. You seem to demand a pop sci answer and yet refuse to accept the pop sci answer which is a pretty major contradiction if you ask me.
>>16991543because before that, for around two decades, nerds came biannually to CASP to see that they were making very little progress to simualting protein folding. Then alphafold came and essentially resolved the problem so much that now CASP has to put new types of competition eg. molecules interaction to have a reason to exist. >people acted like it was the holy grail of biology and would cure everythingwhoever told you that was just bullshitting you. Being capable to resolve protein structures for any given aminoacid sequence is a big leap ahead but it is just the first stepping stone towards new discoveries. Like CRISPR-Cas9, Alphafold has been extensively used but you need to actually take a look at sectorial literature to understand the impact
>>16991615I would assume that predicting AS chain folding correctly is still bit of a step away from actually designing proteins from scratch. For now you can likely heavily use it for redesigning individual domains or shorter stretches like catalytic centers. With machine learning and enough data derived from these applications (paired with existing protein folding data) you might get closer to designer proteins here soon.
>>16991543it's like the human genome project. it's a big deal that accelerates research and makes new research possible, but the research still needs to be done
>>16991621I made my own though
