Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by PessimalDecimal 886 days ago
As a total outsider to this area of research, why is AlphaFold's potential most notable specifically for psychedelics?
1 comments

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.