ArticleCommunications chemistry2025
Challenging AlphaFold in predicting proteins with large-scale allosteric transitions.
Article in Communications chemistry, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- RNP interfaces as regulatory "active sites": a repurposing strategy for small molecules targeting viral 5'-untranslated regions.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2026Article
- The transformative impact of AI-enabled AlphaFold 3: evolution, current status, and future prospects in structural biology.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2026Review
- Structural quality-tier assessment for TCR-pMHC functional enrichment.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Article
- Adversarial Sequence Mutations in AlphaFold and ESMFold Reveal Nonphysical Structural Invariance, Confidence Failures, and Concerns for Protein Design.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Article
- Insight into Malt1 activation mechanism through synergetic approach of AlphaFold, MD Simulation and NMR dynamic analyses.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many proteins function by toggling between distinct conformations, yet most structure predictors have been trained on data that do not capture this conformational diversity. Here, we benchmarked AlphaFold2, AlphaFold3, and recent variants on autoinhibited proteins, a class of allosterically regulated, often multi-domain proteins that exist in equilibrium between active and autoinhibited states. Our analyses show that AlphaFold2 fails to reproduce the experimental structures of many autoinhibited proteins, which is reflected in reduced confidence scores. This contrasts sharply with its high-accuracy, high-confidence predictions of non-autoinhibited multi-domain proteins. When tested for its ability to capture conformational diversity, we found that AlphaFold2 performs better when combined with uniform subsampling of sequence alignments rather than local subsampling. BioEmu and AlphaFold3 improve upon these results, yet still struggle to accurately reproduce details of experimental structures. Together, our study underscores the persistent challenges of predicting protein structures shaped by complex energy landscapes.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.