This is not even close to reality. AlphaFold is not a solution to the protein folding problem, it's (useful) pattern matching to the end state of solved folded protein (in situations that can be pattern matched). If this is considered "solving the protein folding problem" then X-ray crystallography solved it first, 75 years ago.
There is essentially zero "how" information coming to us from AlphaFold. This type of reporting is incorrect, and irresponsible to the folks that are still working on that how problem.
And to be clear I do think it was nobel worthy.
OTOH I don't think they made up the "solved" label - the CASP benchmark had always considered reaching the AlphaFold level of predictive accuracy (within error tolerance of our ability to experimentally verify via X-ray crystallography etc) as "solving" the problem.
David Baker is the GOAT of that field, it should have been awarded to him only.
There is no guarantee that a tractable method exists to analytically invert protein folding. Data-driven methods like alphafold may be the only option.
The article is fine. AlphaFold is widely regarded as "solving" protein folding.
To SOLVE it would easily win the Nobel, possibly the Turing and more.
Designer proteins would change the world and medicine also in unimaginable ways.
Is this existing database enough for researchers?
I'm guessing Google can't make money on them.
You can do more with the weights than just the protein structures. You can design new proteins. So no, the database is not enough. But the weights and a university cluster are enough.
The weights are free for non-commercial use. And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.
Edit: after reading the article, I realise it's about the disbanding of the team, so probably your original comment is correct.
Also they already got their nobel prize, so the marketing benefit is already maxed out.
Given we have heard a lot about limited compute available at Google internally to employees I would guess they are freeing up resources wherever they can
I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?
And then host then database.
AlphaFold did not yet solve the Folding@home protein folding problem.
Folding@home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
It seems that Isomorphic Labs is somewhat a continuation of the AlphaFold work, and the first attempt to commercialize it, so maybe they will get more than just good will out of it.
> In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions.
Why is there no information on corroborations of the predictions? Anyone can make predictions. Surely there must have been teams picking predicted structures out of the database and comparing them to actual molecules?