You guys know that I'm normally in the 'wet blanket' crowd with scientific or technology news. Well, for once I'm going to withhold my pessimism. Because CASP just announced some extraordinary data from AlphaFold, the DeepMind protein folding effort:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020...ein-structures

Long story short? It's really, really hard to predict the 3D structure of a protein in silico; the gold standard has typically been x-ray crystallography which is very hard indeed. People have been working on this problem for decades with modest improvements but definite limitations. Well, the data coming out today sure looks like they've blown away all previous attempts and have near-parity with x-ray crystallography using deep learning techniques.

What does this mean? Assuming this can be replicated in more proteins and can be done quickly and at scale, the pace of target discovery and rational drug design will have just increased dramatically. And studying new proteins (like, say, the capsule proteins on a novel virus) will get much faster, allowing for rapid identification of potential therapeutics.

I am absolutely shocked this happened so quickly, this has been a very very hard problem for a very long time. Kudos to DeepMind on this, and I can't wait to see what people come up with using their technology!