What AlphaFold Unlocked

Within a year of CASP14, DeepMind and EMBL-EBI released the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database: first the human proteome, then over 200 million predicted structures covering essentially every cataloged protein.

A structure lookup went from a multi-year PhD project to a web search. Structural biologists now routinely start from a prediction and spend lab time on the interesting question instead of the bottleneck one — crystallographers even use predictions as molecular-replacement starting models to solve real diffraction data faster.