Given that we already had Alphafold... And we already had a big database of proteins... Running Alphafold on that database seems... unremarkable?
Was it a massive amount of computation that is inaccessible to anyone else? Is there a good reason to run it on the whole database, not just the handful of proteins you want to investigate?
To me the announcement is a bit like saying "we've run prime number analysis on every phone number in the united states!". Great... anyone could have done that... And nobody has done it yet because it wasn't super important to anyone.
"ML model predicts data from the training set" doesn't make a very good headline does it?
edit: wrote it in a sarcastic way, but I would love to understand if that's what it actually is or if there is an actual difference between this and what AlphaFold does.
It was indeed a huge amount of computation. On Colab it takes about 2-3 hours to fold a single protein. So the resources required to fold 200 million is far beyond what most organizations have. Just as importantly, making the results easy to search and download will really impact a lot of biology.
Was it a massive amount of computation that is inaccessible to anyone else? Is there a good reason to run it on the whole database, not just the handful of proteins you want to investigate?
To me the announcement is a bit like saying "we've run prime number analysis on every phone number in the united states!". Great... anyone could have done that... And nobody has done it yet because it wasn't super important to anyone.