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That's pretty much it. Protein structures are immensely complex. Think of stringing a 50 magnets on a piece of string, then trying to predict the structure it
by refurb 4y ago
That's pretty much it.
Protein structures are immensely complex. Think of stringing a 50 magnets on a piece of string, then trying to predict the structure it would take on if in zero gravity?
We have a pretty big set of protein structures that are known. AI is takes those known structures, plus a set of rules about how amino acids might bind when a part of a protein chain, then tries to predict conformation.
If you ask AI to predict a known structure, it will do well, because, that's the training data.
Ask it to predict a structure that isn't known, and it will do a good job get it's mostly right, but the small differences make all the difference.
It's not a useless tool by any means, but the predictive power is still quite limited.
- le-mark 4y ago> Think of stringing a 50 magnets on a piece of string, then trying to predict the structure it would take on if in zero gravity? It’s actually even more complex than that due to interaction with the local environment at the time of adding the magnets onto the string. Both the aqueous and transcription machinery.
- refurb 4y agoI was trying to keep it simple, but yes. It's not only the protein composition itself, but also the environment. It's like trying to solve an equation with 1000's of unknown variables and only 200 rules on variable interactions that are correct 90% of the time. Even just modeling a 100% pure aqueous environment and the interactions of water molecules is a massively complex problem.