"It's a game changer," says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, who assessed the performance of different teams in CASP. AlphaFold has already helped him find the structure of a protein that has vexed his lab for a decade, and he expects it will alter how he works and the questions he tackles. "This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything," Lupas adds.
In some cases, AlphaFold's structures predictions were indistinguishable from those determined using 'gold standard' experimental methods such as X-ray crystallography and, in recent years,
cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). AlphaFold may not obviate the need for these laborious and expensive methods — yet — say scientists, but the AI will make it possible to study living things in new ways.
