NEWS FEATURE
19 September 2023
Combining experimental and computational tools, this company is targeting disordered regions of proteins previously thought to be undruggable.
Michael Eisenstein
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
The rise of AlphaFold may not have put structural biologists out of work, but it has undeniably transformed the field by allowing researchers to nearly instantaneously generate high-quality predictions of structures for many proteins that would take months or years to experimentally determine. But we are still far from a full solution to the ‘protein structure prediction problem’. “There’s a ridiculous amount of structural disorder in proteins,” says Kamil Tamiola, CEO and co-founder of London, England–based Peptone. The total number of such proteins remains an open question, but he estimates that as many as 18,000 human proteins—roughly 75% of the proteome—may contain stretches of 70 or more amino acids that lack a stable and defined structural conformation. Such ‘intrinsically disordered’ regions currently remain an insurmountable challenge for AlphaFold or any other structure-prediction program.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41587-023-00011-x
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