Next Big Thing?

[Rahul_Patel]

nature.com/articles/d41586-...

[AlanMeyer]

Looks to me like a very big thing. I expect that it will have no direct impact on cancer treatment for many years. It's the kind of thing that is most valuable to very basic research, the kind of research that involves the structure and function of protein molecules, not the complex medical research that looks at the interactions of tumor cells with treatments. However, basic research eventually leads to practical research and I expect that, if this work pans out, it will have a very significant impact down the road. It will be a great advance in the toolkit for molecular biology.

Alan

[Spyder54]

Thank you Rahul.“Has the potential to revolutionize the Life Sciences”. And…..”In addition to the predicted structures, which cover 98.5% of known human proteins and a similar percentage for other organisms, AlphaFold generated a measurement of the confidence of its predictions. “We want to give experimentalists and biologists a really clear signal of which parts of the predictions they should rely on,” says Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, a science engineer at DeepMind and first author of a Nature paper describing the human proteome predictions2. For the human proteome, 58% of its predictions for the locations of individual amino acids were good enough to be confident in the shape of the protein’s folds, Tunyasuvunakool says. A subset of those predictions — 36% of the total — are potentially precise enough to detail atomic features useful for drug design, such as the active site of an enzyme.”