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DeepMind's AI is Claimed to Make Gigantic Leap in Solving Protein Structures

Hartree writes:

DeepMind's program, called AlphaFold, outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced on 30 November, at the start of the conference — held virtually this year — that takes stock of the exercise.

John Moult of the University of Maryland in College Park (founder of this conference) says: "In some sense the problem is solved."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4

Many Caveats: This seems unusually breathless for Nature and this is a very hard problem that's been worked on for decades. Having worked in a group studying the protein folding problem back in the 80s, I've learned to be pretty skeptical of miracles in this over the years. That said if it is accurate that this works well enough to provide clues to x-ray diffraction determination of structure in hard cases, that alone makes it very worthwhile. If it works well in truly de novo cases without other information like x-ray diffraction or nuclear magnetic resonance then it would be just as revolutionary as the article says.

Folding @ Alpha

JoeMerchant writes:

Google's Deepmind claims to have created an artificially intelligent program called "AlphaFold" that is able to solve protein folding problems in a matter of days.

If it works, the solution has come "decades" before it was expected, according to experts, and could have transformative effects in the way diseases are treated.

There are 200 million known proteins at present but only a fraction have actually been unfolded to fully understand what they do and how they work. Even those that have been successfully understood often rely on expensive and time-intensive techniques, with scientists spending years unfolding each structure and relying on equipment that can cost many millions of dollars.

DeepMind worked on the AI project with the 14th Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14), a group of scientists who have been looking into the matter since 1994.

Go, Chess, COVID...

Also at Science Magazine and TechCrunch.

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