• ranzispa@mander.xyzOP
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      1 month ago

      Not solved, no. Definitely much much better than before. The difference AlphaFold made is significant: we’re talking about getting a decent model in a couple minutes using a PC compared to several months of calculations before.

      However we still need experimental data: in many occasions AlphaFold gives an incorrect model. With some experimental data that model can be improved, but we still have no reliable way to know what the structure of a protein is starting from the amino acidic sequence without extensive experimentation.

      That’s the big promise of quantum computers, there are however two major problems in my opinion:

      1. There’s still no theoretical framework which explains how once we have a quantum computer we may tackle protein folding
      2. Plenty quantum computing companies closed shortly after AlphaFold was published since they lost all funding because protein folding was “solved”