Re:AlphaFold Predictions Driven by Memorization
by __jochen__ on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @04:25PM
(#41372568)
Agreed, that this is a limited scope for what AF does. Nevertheless, it seems interesting to confirm that its primary strengths are memorization, which is not surprising.
Anyway, its conclusions are a bit grandiose, we already would have expected AF2 and 3 to do poorly on predicting both structures of a fold-switcher. And nobody really thinks that AF "learns the protein's energy function"- AF3 does nothing of the sort.
Most of AF3's abilities are memorization, but that's not a bad thing. It's already been shown to generalize out of class but also work poorly where there is poor data density (either coevolutionary data, or structural data).