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Where to From Here?

The biological-biochemical community has been shocked and delighted by the remarkable progress that has recently been made on a problem that has consumed the attention, energy, and resources of many, if not most of the scientists in the field for the past 50 years. The problem has been to predict th...

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Autores principales: Schleif, Robert, Espinosa, Manuel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8990317/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35402507
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2022.848444
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author Schleif, Robert
Espinosa, Manuel
author_facet Schleif, Robert
Espinosa, Manuel
author_sort Schleif, Robert
collection PubMed
description The biological-biochemical community has been shocked and delighted by the remarkable progress that has recently been made on a problem that has consumed the attention, energy, and resources of many, if not most of the scientists in the field for the past 50 years. The problem has been to predict the tertiary structure of a protein merely from its amino acid sequence. Nature does it easily enough, but it has been an incredibly difficult problem, often considered intractable, for humankind. The breakthrough has come in the form of two computer-based approaches, AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold in conjunction with factors such as the use of vast computing power, the field of artificial intelligence, and the existence of huge protein sequence databases. The advancement of these tools depended upon and was stimulated by the last 50 years of development of smaller and smaller and more and more powerful electronics components, mainly processors and memory. Along with the problem of protein folding, determining the function or mechanism of action of proteins has similarly limped along as did protein folding until the recent breakthroughs. Perhaps AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold can substantially aid in protein mechanistic studies. Now it is not completely insane to consider what might be the next grand challenge in biochemistry-biology. We offer several possibilities.
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spelling pubmed-89903172022-04-09 Where to From Here? Schleif, Robert Espinosa, Manuel Front Mol Biosci Molecular Biosciences The biological-biochemical community has been shocked and delighted by the remarkable progress that has recently been made on a problem that has consumed the attention, energy, and resources of many, if not most of the scientists in the field for the past 50 years. The problem has been to predict the tertiary structure of a protein merely from its amino acid sequence. Nature does it easily enough, but it has been an incredibly difficult problem, often considered intractable, for humankind. The breakthrough has come in the form of two computer-based approaches, AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold in conjunction with factors such as the use of vast computing power, the field of artificial intelligence, and the existence of huge protein sequence databases. The advancement of these tools depended upon and was stimulated by the last 50 years of development of smaller and smaller and more and more powerful electronics components, mainly processors and memory. Along with the problem of protein folding, determining the function or mechanism of action of proteins has similarly limped along as did protein folding until the recent breakthroughs. Perhaps AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold can substantially aid in protein mechanistic studies. Now it is not completely insane to consider what might be the next grand challenge in biochemistry-biology. We offer several possibilities. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-03-25 /pmc/articles/PMC8990317/ /pubmed/35402507 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2022.848444 Text en Copyright © 2022 Schleif and Espinosa. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Molecular Biosciences
Schleif, Robert
Espinosa, Manuel
Where to From Here?
title Where to From Here?
title_full Where to From Here?
title_fullStr Where to From Here?
title_full_unstemmed Where to From Here?
title_short Where to From Here?
title_sort where to from here?
topic Molecular Biosciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8990317/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35402507
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2022.848444
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