← The Shape of Life · Lesson 3 of 4
A prediction, and how sure it is
Since 2020, computer programs such as AlphaFold have predicted the shapes of hundreds of millions of proteins from their sequences alone.
A good prediction says how confident it is about each part. On the Fold Commons Viewer, confident parts look firm and less confident parts look faint, like a pencil sketch.
Low confidence is not always a mistake. It often marks a floppy part that really does move, and some of those floppy parts do important work.
A predicted structure shows one long tail with very low confidence. What is a reasonable reading?
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