Protein Folding Neural Networks Are Not Robust

Deep neural networks such as AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold predict remarkably accurate structures of proteins compared to other algorithmic approaches. It is known that biologically small perturbations in the protein sequence do not lead to drastic changes in the protein structure. In this paper, we demonstrate that RoseTTAFold does not exhibit such a robustness despite its high accuracy, and biologically small perturbations for some input sequences result in radically different predicted protein structures. This raises the challenge of detecting when these predicted protein structures cannot be trusted.

There is still a lot of work to do with AI in biology...

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Interesting! I presume old Rosetta can be of some help there to determine the robustness of the result.

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