> AlphaFold is an important advance, and it is laughable that the author is dismissing it citing NP-hardness Well, the NP-hardness argument might not be the re

> AlphaFold is an important advance, and it is laughable that the author is dismissing it citing NP-hardness Well, the NP-hardness argument might not be the relevant one, but how useful the structures determined by AF2 are has yet to be demonstrated. Protein folding is very complex; what AF2 has in the training set and CASP in the test set are proteins which were accessible to structure determination up to now at all; most proteins were measured in crystallized (i.e. not their natural) form, so the resulting static structure is likely not representative; and not to forget that many proteins get another conformation than the one to be expected by thermodynamics etc. e.g. because they're integrated in a complex with other proteins and/or "modified" by chaperones; so it would be quite naive to assume that from now on you can just throw a sequence into the black box and the right structure comes out. This article two clicks away from the referenced one is much more relevant: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/alphafold2-casp14-it-feels-like-ones-child-has-left-home/amp/ https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/alphafold2-cas...