[aswanson]

Wow. This is really enlightening; I thought that the computational method was going to open a new phase in disease treatment, but you seem to say here that the empirical method is on its way to making it useless. So the Pande group at Stanford is wasting their time. Interesting.

[timr]

"So the Pande group at Stanford is wasting their time."

I wouldn't go quite that far. The research is definitely speculative, but lots of interesting things can come from speculative research. My point is that you don't do research into protein structure prediction with the intent of finding anything useful. It's basic science.

We can (and occasionally do) learn things from computer models of proteins. But the PR in this field has been seriously exaggerating the results of a few of the more prominent researchers. We're a long way from curing diseases or designing drugs with this stuff.

[aswanson]

Is it the weakness of the modeling or the lack of computational horsepower that limits the research in this area? And would you mind linking to your papers?

[timr]

That's a matter of debate. Some people think that the problem is search limited, others think that the current models are bad. In my opinion, the bulk of the evidence supports the latter conclusion.

Backchannel me, and I'll be happy to provide you with references to the papers I wrote/helped write. Most of them aren't open access, unfortunately.

[aswanson]

Will do. And thanks for the info, you may have spared me a decade or so of wasted effort.