What are the big implications of being good at predicting protein structures?
This can be applied to just about any area of biology. You could design novel antigens to combat disease, and then easily mass-produce them. Or just inject the RNA to have the body produce them.
But the applications are boundless, from genetically modifying crops, to anti-aging, and more.
It is also one of the key pathways to molecular nanotechnology, where instead of building arbitrary structures out of amino acids, we increase the range of arbitrary molecules we can design, build, and produce in quantity.
Specific structures are useful in all manner of ways, from cleaving a DNA molecule at a specific point, enzymes for breaking apart molecules, etc.
Very, very useful.
Just to frame it a particular way, biological systems are basically solved nanotechnology, extremely good, self-sustaining, resilient little machines that have spent a long time optimizing to be better and better. But all the designs are preset, if we can crack the code and design our own little machines, then amazing things like more plastic-like cellulose could be made, all sorts of problems are suddenly far easier to solve. But also a lot of new problems emerge that weren't even imaginable before, since the code being cracked is a big chunk of the code of life itself. So, yknow, playing God and all, so there probably will be some negative consequences of this too.
Generally speaking molecular nanotechnology will solve all the "intractable" problems we as a society face today: climate change, poverty, biological death from old age / disease / cancer, and more.
We could also create tools of destruction so vast, it can be hard to contemplate.
- better predict drug binding to proteins (massive benefits if accurate)
- better understand the functional outcomes of missense mutations on proteins
- study protein-protein interactions
- and in general, just gain a better understanding of biology (which is driven by proteins and their reactions/interactions)