Go with the fold
From a seemingly impossible problem a few years ago, some researchers think that predicting the folded structures of protein could be solved pretty soon. James Mitchell Crow reports
Every two years, the international community of protein structure researchers runs a competition to assess the latest progress in computer modelling to predict the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence. They were on the brink of abandoning it until the 2014 competition, when something changed – David Baker and his colleagues had made incredible progress and were starting to get their predictions almost right.