Are there any molecular biologists here? I'm curious: what happens to society if/when we figure out protein folding? Hypothetically, how does the world change if we had a 100% accurate way to model quaternary structure from primary structure?
So at least according to him we've lived in that world for the last 5 years.
As a person working with / tangentially to people in the same field I would say that it's made things faster and more scalable, but protein structure isn't the be all end all of things. Researchers use AlphaFold a lot for filtering potential candidates, but that is only one step in a lot of steps. A SNP mutation -> protein structure change -> functional change is already difficult without then considering that the vast majority of mutations that create function change in humans are not in exons, so something like AlphaFold (in the form I'm familiar with) would be useless for those as well.
Eventually though an AI system that can go mutation->function change is entirely possible, although it is much much further in the future. In that case though I think you'll be quite close to a future where combined with things like CRISPR therapeutic treatment for all heritable disease would be possible.
AlphaFold is a huge advance and people are extending it to try to tackle this (eg AlphaMissense) but to say it solved protein folding is hyperbolic.
Quoting a PhD immunologist from Texas, who uses AlphaFold daily.
Just my ¢¢ half-sanity.
[1] Isn't a single hydrogen diatom just 1nm wide? How much smaller can transistor gates be safely assembled? Didn't we physically stop getting physically smaller around 14nm?
To me, "solving" structure prediction (explicitly acknowledging there are areas where AF doesn't make accurate predictions), is a clear and satisfying win, although it still doesn't answer some of the fundamental physics questions around folding.
I am glad to see the existence proof but want to see more outcomes; in particular, I'd like to see a lab-in-the-loop that actually produces something of high value (higher than the cost of building the lab-in-the-loop).
I think its like saying "we know how to make bricks and iron and bolts now, shouldnt it be easy to make a full scale functioning replica of the greater tokyo metropolitan area?"
Even if you came up with a spec for a complex tissue or just a fluid that functions as a standalone chemical factory, you would need to fabricate it. However many specific protiens from your library, in specific ratios, mixed and maybe even... positioned.
In short protein folding is just the first fundamental step towards this print any biological design out of proteins world that I guessed you are alluding to.
Fold prediction is an incredibly useful tool for scientists and genetic engineers to help design new proteins, but it doesn't magically solve molecular or cell biology. Designing new functions and mechanisms is still going to involve a huge amount of labor and brute-force experimentation.
So my takeaway is that we just need sufficiently advanced quantum computers that can do molecule-level simulation on a large cell, THEN we'll be there.