Protein folding and AlphaFold explained for software engineers
You might be wondering what's stopping us from building a simulation of a complex living organism from DNA. Researching this question might take forever, but it’s reasonable to start with one of the first roadblocks - the protein-folding problem. Protein folding is one of the most important unsolved fundamental problems in biology. Solving it would significantly speed up disease research, drug discovery, and production of synthetic proteins. Examples of diseases caused by misfolded proteins are: Alzheimer's, Parkinson’s, Huntington's, and even several allergies. Protein folding can be an especially interesting challenge for engineers and data scientists since the state-of-the-art software (Alpha Fold) is developed by one of the most famous AI companies - DeepMind. And they are not experts in biology; their expertise lies in machine learning. Introduction into Protein Folding Let's start with the basics: protein is a large biomolecule and it consists of chains