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The rise of AlphaFold may not have put structural biologists out of work, but it has undeniably transformed the field by allowing researchers to nearly instantaneously generate high-quality predictions of structures for many proteins that would take months or years to experimentally determine. But we are still far from a full solution to the ‘protein structure prediction problem’. “There's a ridiculous amount of structural disorder in proteins,” says Kamil Tamiola, CEO and co-founder of London, England–based Peptone. The total number of such proteins remains an open question, but he estimates that as many as 18,000 human proteins—roughly 75% of the proteome—may contain stretches of 70 or more amino acids that lack a stable and defined structural conformation. Such ‘intrinsically disordered’ regions currently remain an insurmountable challenge for AlphaFold or any other structure-prediction program.
