Miguel Correa
@m_correa_m@fediscience.org
Postdoc researcher at ETH Zürich / Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics | Protein bioinformatics
fediscience.org
I'm seeing quite some indignation in Mastodon about the #AlphaFold team being shut down. I think some context from someone in this area may clarify some things. First, neither the AlphaFold models nor the AlphaFold database are going away, as some seem to be implying. In any case, this is an area of intense research with many players and AF-style models are now dime a dozen, including open-source alternatives with more permissive licenses (it's frankly hard to keep track of all the models that come out). Second, this doesn't mean Google is exiting this area; instead, these efforts will probably be redirected to closed-source work at Isomorphic (see IsoDDE). And finally, this is not really a surprise. John Jumper, who led the team, had already indicated last year his research focus was going to be elsewhere.