Protein Hallucination
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the developers of AlphaFold. An article in Nature describes five protein-design questions that still challenge AI:
- Building reliable binders for proteins that bind to small molecules
- Designing new catalysts
- Accounting for conformational changes
- Creating complex protein structures
- Learning from mistakes
But honestly, it seems that researchers face the same hurdles as everyone else:
Generative AI systems have other limitations, including a tendency to ‘hallucinate’ protein structures that cannot exist in nature. The AI is “always trying to please”, says Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York City. “It never, ever says, ‘no, this is not doable’.”
/g