A watershed moment for protein structure prediction

Re:A watershed moment for protein structure prediction by hobofan on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:19AM (#22099856)

> I expect more breakthroughs from deep understanding and modeling than ML

Huh, I would've said exactly the opposite. The feature space of the variations of amino acid sequences is so big that I wouldn't bet on breakthroughs derived from understanding. Most recent advances seem to focus on how specific sequence motifs interact with each other, which are generally only applicable to certain kinds of proteins, but not protein folding as a whole.

My prediction would be that next breakthroughs that push the field over the usability limit are derived from more general machine learning advances.

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Re:A watershed moment for protein structure prediction by nestorD on Monday January 20, 2020 @01:49PM (#22101152)

I think deep learning can only get us so far with the existing, limited, data. I doubt it will be enough for precise structure reconstruction (but I would love to be wrong).

What it can be is a force multiplier for every progress in our understanding of why those sequences are transcribed into those structures.

But I have to admit that, with years of head-on, the research has not gotten there so I might be wrong.

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