[_yb2s]

In my opinion, absolutely. The "protein folding problem" has been widely regarded as one of the biggest challenges in molecular biology for over half a century, and Alphafold has effectively solved it. I would put this up there with Sanger winning the prize for discovering how to sequence DNA and Kary Mullis for inventing PCR... this will have widespread implications for allowing us to understand, and even design proteins.

[dekhn]

But they didn't solve the protein folding problem. They solved a simpler problem, protein structure prediction.

What is important about their discovery is that we now know for certain that a judicious combination of expensive-to-obtain structure information, and easy-to-obtain protein sequence relationships can be used to build a generalized protein structure predictor (it can predict structures with no prior example of a fold, although there are limits)... and you don't have solve the general folding problem to do it. You do not need to know the path, to get to the destination!

Many of us in the field expected this to be true but there wasn't any really good example to point to that was widely accepted by the community. And in the ~year or so since this was demonstrated, the community has already found a wide range of uses for this that have validated the structure predictions and demonstrated their utility- using open codes and models.