[HN Gopher] RNA structure prediction is hard. How much does that...
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       RNA structure prediction is hard. How much does that matter?
        
       Author : abhishaike
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2025-09-26 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.owlposting.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.owlposting.com)
        
       | nextworddev wrote:
       | Alphafold3 never claimed to solve rna structure prediction though
        
         | abhishaike wrote:
         | oh yeah, I didn't mean to say that they did claim that, that
         | was just my (mis)conception
        
       | cing wrote:
       | Author made it clear this was an educational essay, but
       | concluding the problem has very limited therapeutic applications
       | comes across like a bit of a take down for Atomic AI's platform.
        
         | abhishaike wrote:
         | I think it has very limited therapeutic applications with what
         | we know about RNA structure _today_! But there 's a great deal
         | of completely unknown RNA biology (some of which I touch on in
         | the essay) that may greatly benefit from RNA structure. The bit
         | I mention about Arrakis Therapeutics preclinical work in
         | drugging the (structured) RNA version of the MYC protein points
         | to that being a very real possibility. All interesting biotech
         | startups are built on bets on where the future is going, and
         | I'm very happy that _someone_ (AtomicAI and others) is betting
         | on this, because clearly the answer of  'is RNA structure
         | useful' isn't super open-and-shut
        
         | fabian2k wrote:
         | RNA structures are really more of a basic research thing.
         | Having better tools there would be useful to understand these
         | parts better. That's not irrelevant, but it doesn't lead
         | directly to therapeutic applications.
         | 
         | RNAs so far have been very bad drug targets. That is to a large
         | part inherent in their properties, they have fewer different
         | components (4 bases compared to 20 amino acids) and the RNA
         | backbone is strongly charged and interactions with something
         | like that are generally unspecific. Odds are that RNA will
         | remain a bad drug target for almost all cases.
        
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