The past week was a momentous occasion for protein structure prediction, structural biology at large, and in due time, may prove to be so for the whole of life sciences. CASP14, the conference for the biennial competition for the prediction of protein structure from sequence, took place virtually over multiple remote working platforms. DeepMind, Google’s premier AI research group, entered the competition as they did the previous time, when they upended expectations of what an industrial research lab can do. The outcome this time was very, very different however. At CASP13 DeepMind made an impressive showing with AlphaFold but was ultimately within the bounds of the usual expectations of academic progress, albeit at an accelerated rate. At CASP14 DeepMind produced an advance so thorough it compelled CASP organizers to declare the protein structure prediction problem for single protein chains to be solved. In my read of most CASP14 attendees (virtual as it was), I sense that this was
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