Reply to post: There was a time......

Hype versus reality: What you can't do with DeepMind's AlphaFold in drug discovery

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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There was a time......

When just predicitng how a string of amino acids would fold was viewed as combinatorically impossible.

Which it no longer is. This is great.

If you want to make a protein shape on demand (which you might want to)

Turns out that's the wrong question.

What you wanted to ask is "Given this existing, natural protein, what shapes do I need to make (possibly with an amino acid string, possibly by straight organic chemistry) that lock onto it"

There is a phrase, "The inverse problem" that kind of covers this but doesn't quite. The classic example is where you want to design a wing shape (say for a fluid pump) that delivers certain specific performance parameters, rather than try shapes and analyse them and check what parameters they give. Software to solve this problem does exist but the optimal wing may demand tolerances, or razor edges, that cannot be made by any existing tools.

Still good to know the SoA has substantially advanced in this corner of the problem.

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