Comment by entee

2 years ago

> It’s only marginally less useful to actual biology than full on X-ray structures anyway.

I'm not sure what you're implying here. Are you saying both types of structures are useful, but not as useful as the hype suggests, or that an X-Ray Crystal (XRC) and low confidence structures are both very useful with the XRC being marginally more so?

An XRC structure is great, but it's a very (very) long way from getting me to a drug. Observe the long history of fully crystalized proteins still lacking a good drug. Or this piece on the general failure of purely structure guided efforts in drug discovery for COVID (https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/virtual-screening-...). I think this tech will certainly be helpful, but for most problems I don't see it being better than a slightly-more-than-marginal gain in our ability to find medicines.

Edit: To clarify, if the current state of the field is "given a well understood structure, I often still can't find a good medicine without doing a ton of screening experiments" then it's hard to see how much this helps us. I can also see several ways in which a less than accurate structure could be very misleading.

FWIW I can see a few ways in which it could be very useful for hypothesis generation too, but we're still talking pretty early stage basic science work with lots of caveats.