Comment by RandomLensman
2 years ago
If the predictions are generally good enough, could also skip the validation and directly try to get a desired effect or reaction. That isn't strictly speaking validating the structure, but depending on the use case might be easier to just go for an outcome - really a question of application and cost efficiency.
I mean nothing is stopping you from skipping validation with pre-alphafold techniques and say for drug discovery to already do drug screening using the predicted structure. It's just the drug screening software is already error prone so you are still going to have to do some validation. However having an idea on a potential structure means that you can do other techniques that are simpler to validate it that are less expensive/time consuming (I'm thinking of things similar to FRET).
Another idea is these may come into play for anti-verification, so if you are drug screening against a known structure. You could potentially use these more flawed structures of proteins you don't want to target but may be similar, and try to reduce the drug's efficacy at binding them. Or something to that effect. All of that is fun ideas that are currently being explored in that space but we'll see where it takes us.