Hacker News Reader

Comment by itchyjunk | Hacker News Reader

Was alalphafold2 that big of a landmark in application sense? I realize the protein folding problem is a hard and important one. But I didn't realize this result had immediate practical application. Will they just be consulting pharmas? Patienting proteins and such?

View on HN

I think it could be Nobel Prize worthy. Protein’s structure often determines its effect as a catalyst. So to map the DNA to the 2nd order outcomes seems like it could be the missing ingredient to controlling the properties of cells.

Personally I’m hoping that someone smarter than me figures out how to displace existing catalysts like platinum and palladium. Seems like it could be a pretty penny and some positive environmental impact to boot.

Pt and Pd are pretty different from proteins in terms of the reactions they’re used to catalyze, but check out https://opencatalystproject.org/

This is wonderful. I’m going to see if there is anything I can build for this.

Protein catalysts almost always contain an inorganic atom. We will be able to make more efficient catalysts with better understanding of protein structure but the need for metals won't necessarily go away.

The protein catalysts can utilize more common metal ions instead of the rarer metals. Placing an iron atom in the right protein structure will affect the reaction probabilities.

Not really - it's just consistently better than everyone else, and obviously the best solution that anyone is likely to come up with for a while. But there were already plenty of examples of near-perfect de novo structure predictions from other groups, going back more than a decade.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com