I think you're referring to the prediction of "secondary structure" of proteins, which was attempted using neural network models as early as 1989. [1] Predictin

I think you're referring to the prediction of "secondary structure" of proteins, which was attempted using neural network models as early as 1989. [1] Predicting secondary structure is child's play compared to predicting the folded tertiary structure of a protein, hence the continued use of insanely computationally expensive ab initio folding efforts like Folding@Home. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC286422/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC286422/