AlphaFold’s potential in revolutionizing drug discovery, especially in the realm of psychedelics for antidepressants, marks a significant paradigm shift.
The protein class they bind to has historically been hard to determine structures experimentally and had high flexibility. The preprint that is the basis of the article showed that using traditional virtual screening against Alphafold structures had similar success rates as screening against experimental structures. Additionally, the Alphafold structures may represent alternative conformations of the proteins not seen in the experiment-derived structures.