Re:No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding
by dnautics on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:45PM
(#25311834)
just for clarification, I don't know for certain, but it sounds like this is what they are talking about in science-journalism speak:
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=25262458&goto=threads%...
So they bootstrapped the phases of the X-ray diffraction pattern with the phases from AlphaFold. This does mean, though, that we must be critical - it is possible that they are converging to nonsense that AlphaFold has generated. To be truly sure, you must have some sort of independent confirmation. Might still be "good enough" depending on what your application is.
So Lupas set a special challenge: a membrane protein from a species of archaea, an ancient group of microbes. For 10 years, his research team tried every trick in the book to get an x-ray crystal structure of the protein. “We couldn’t solve it.”
But AlphaFold had no trouble. It returned a detailed image of a three-part protein with two long helical arms in the middle. The model enabled Lupas and his colleagues to make sense of their x-ray data; within half an hour, they had fit their experimental results to AlphaFold’s predicted structure. “It’s almost perfect,” Lupas says. “They could not possibly have cheated on this. I don’t know how they do it.”
Sure, you want to validate thing experimentally, but that isn't different to imaging.
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/game-has-changed-ai-...