Supercomputer Sets Protein-Folding Record

Nicros writes with this snippet from Nature News: "A specially designed supercomputer named Anton has simulated changes in a protein's three-dimensional structure over a period of a millisecond — a time-scale more than a hundred-fold greater than the previous record. ... The simulations revealed how the proteins changed as they folded, unfolded and folded again. 'The agreement with experimental data is amazing,' says Chandra Verma, a computational structural biologist at the Bioinformatics Institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. Simulating the basic pancreatic trypsin inhibitor over the course of a millisecond took Anton about 100 days — roughly as long as computers spent toiling over previous simulations that only spanned 10 microseconds."

Comments

not really

[pigwiggle]

This has been the promise of computer simulation - "in silico" drug design - for decades. It hasn't panned out. And I say this as someone who makes a living doing exactly what these folks have done. High throughput bench work is far more efficient, time and money wise, than computer simulation. Hard to say when or if that will change.

Re:Even though it was published in Nature News...

[the gnat]

This was not an ab initio, calculation. It's all atom MD, which itself is an approximation

Sorry, I meant "ab initio MD", although I realize that to a chemist or physicist this is a total oxymoron. (My background is molecular biology and bioinformatics, where we try not to think about quantum chemistry.) I should have written "physically-based", if you prefer, as opposed to the knowledge-based approaches that have been most successful for de novo structure prediction. (I think most MD "force fields" are ultimately based on genuinely ab initio QM calculations.)