I wonder if they used the output of alpha fold? Remember that Deepmind published the 3D structure of hundreds of millions of proteins for FREE. Imagine if they walled off that data behind an Elsevier like subscription wall? They shoould credit Deep Mind at least
Good point, the article [0] does mention AlphaFold but doesn't cite it.
[0] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00397-6
looks like it - it's such a minor and brief mention in the paper for the article to focus on it so much lol. They probably should have cited it, looks like they decided it was minor enough (or forgot) that they didn't put it in their software used/citation. Super commonly used though I wouldn't be stunned if most of its uses never got cited- just a quick check if it thinks deleting some section or doing some sort of fusion is gonna cause a problem, or if you've got something without a PDB structure finding a site to mess with that looks like it's not gonna cause any problems. You can't count on it blindly obviously but it's super helpful. Like if it's pretty confident about some section of a protein it hasn't seen before, the weird stuff you're studying might not be folded properly by the model, but if you want to stick a handle onto the protein to grab it with whatever it can let you know where's the least likely to be a waste of time and money to try.
> With AI, they could visualize the three-dimensional structure of the PHGDH protein.
Sure sounds like it.
AlphaFold is regurgitating structural information from 10s of thousands of experimental structures acquired at great cost and published to the PDB for free, with no license restrictions of any kind.