Whither structural biologists?

Between December 2020 and July 2021, several spectacular developments in the field of protein-structure prediction changed structural biology profoundly, and they are expected to have an impact on much of modern (molecular) biology, medicine, biochemistry and biotechnology. The unprecedented accuracy of blind protein-structure predictions produced by DeepMind's AlphaFold2 was revealed at the CASP 14 meeting in December 2020. In July 2021, this was followed by publication of the method and release of the code (Jumper et al., 2021). Simultaneously, a prediction method from the Baker lab that achieved similar accuracy was published (Baek et al., 2021). A week later, an additional publication described proteome-scale application of protein-structure prediction using AlphaFold2.