I remember reading about an article from one of the major news outlets dissing Rosetta and others over computational biology. So it hit me recently to ask, Is this computational thing mainstream biology now, or is it still pretty new and everyone is still waiting to see results before getting on board?

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I remember reading about an article from one of the major news outlets dissing Rosetta and others over computational biology. So it hit me recently to ask, Is this computational thing mainstream biology now, or is it still pretty new and everyone is still waiting to see results before getting on board?

One of the exciting things about computational structural biology as an area of scientific research is that it is just coming into its own. Before it becomes truly "mainstream" computational methods still have to improve a bit. For example, while we collectively made some spectacular predictions during casp7 with rosetta@home, there were also some failures. Our continued efforts at improving the methods and algorithms in rosetta will hopefully bring computation into the mainstream in not too long!

As a side note, this is why I believe that every computational structural biology project should have a substantial methods develoment component--there is no program or approach for docking, protien folding, protein structure prediction, etc. that is even close to perfect at present.

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