SCItations

I haven't spent too much time thinking about AlphaFold2 (AF2) since it entered the structural biology zeitgeist, but I was watching Veritasium's recent video on the topic and thought I would learn a bit more about it. For those who haven't heard of AlphaFold2, I highly recommend watching the video linked above, which explains AF2 better than I ever could. But the tl;dr version is this: AlphaFold2 is an artificial intelligence that takes any amino acid sequence (the building blocks of all proteins) as its input, and outputs the 3D protein structure it thinks that sequence is most likely to take. For some sequences, AlphaFold2 can do quite well at this notoriously complex task. On its debut in 2021, it was able to predict the 3D position of atoms in some protein backbones to within a few hundred nanometers! There are a plethora of articles out there speculating about how AF2 is going to change biology and the world at large. But someone recently asked me my opinion: "...