My day job is technical support for basic research in life science, and abuts drug discovery, which is targeted work. Below is a note that I sent to my colleagues at the end of 2020, when last winter's COVID outbreaks were at a terrible high.
--- note begins --- This is really interesting work in life science and work in drug discovery, driven by computation: >From < https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology >: *. . . In the meantime, we’re also looking into how protein structure predictions could contribute to our understanding of specific diseases with a small number of specialist groups, for example by helping to identify proteins that have malfunctioned and to reason about how they interact. These insights could enable more precise work on drug development, complementing existing experimental methods to find promising treatments faster.We’ve also seen signs that protein structure prediction could be useful in future pandemic response efforts, as one of many tools developed by the scientific community. Earlier this year, we predicted several protein structures of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including ORF3a, whose structures were previously unknown. At CASP14, we predicted the structure of another coronavirus protein, ORF8. Impressively quick work by experimentalists has now confirmed the structures of both ORF3a and ORF8. Despite their challenging nature and having very few related sequences, we achieved a high degree of accuracy on both of our predictions when compared to their experimentally determined structures.* An associated video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wJDJ56c88> --- note ends --- > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/63d30dbb-9f43-423c-a9db-4b80328a79dbn%40googlegroups.com.
