How do proteins fold?

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AI may have the answer to one of biology’s biggest challenges

Listing a protein’s amino acids is easy. Machines to do so have existed for decades. But this is only half the battle in the quest to understand how proteins work. What a protein does, and how it does it, depends also on how it folds up after its creation, into its final, intricate shape.X

The idea of using computers to predict proteins’ shapes is half a century old. Progress has been real, but slow, says Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, a multinational endeavour with headquarters in Germany. And it has been marked by a history of wrong turns and premature declarations of victory.

Proteins are even more complicated than Go. One estimate is that a reasonably complex protein could, in principle, take any of as many as 10different shapes. The shape which it does eventually settle into is a result of a balance of various atom-scale forces that act within its amino-acid building blocks, between those building blocks, and between the building blocks and other, surrounding, molecules, particularly those of water.

 

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