I disagree with your assessment that structural biology is useless. Knowing the shape of a protein can be pretty important if you want to perturb the protein’s function by, say, finding or creating a small molecule that binds to it. Crystal structures or cryo-EM structures can shed a lot of light on how a molecule binds to its target, which in turn can suggest further modifications to try and make a tighter binder. It’s not clear to me yet how easy or hard it will be to simulate ligand-protein binding using AlphaFold. I’d lean toward ‘hard’ but maybe molecular dynamics simulations would dovetail well with a structure determined by AlphaFold.
I disagree with your assessment that structural biology is useless. Knowing the shape of a protein can be pretty important if you want to perturb the protein’s function by, say, finding or creating a small molecule that binds to it. Crystal structures or cryo-EM structures can shed a lot of light on how a molecule binds to its target, which in turn can suggest further modifications to try and make a tighter binder. It’s not clear to me yet how easy or hard it will be to simulate ligand-protein binding using AlphaFold. I’d lean toward ‘hard’ but maybe molecular dynamics simulations would dovetail well with a structure determined by AlphaFold.