this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Scientists used IBM's R2 Heron quantum processor to predict the secondary protein structure of a 60-nucleotide-long mRNA sequence.

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[–] DangerBit@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

This article is very poorly written. It conflates protein structure with RNA structure. Proteins are polymers of 20 types of amino acids with comparatively widely varied chemical properties and structures. RNA is a polymer of 4 types of nucleotides with very similar chemical properties and structures. Predicting the secondary structure (structure on a local scale) of RNA is essentially a solved problem on traditional computers and clever but human written algorithms up to several thousand nucleotides.

The novelty here is an iterative increase in complexity in what can be tackled by quantum computing.