Powers of prediction
If the terrifyingly difficult problem of protein folding is getting closer to a solution, what other intractable problems are ripe for answering?
Protein folding is one of those problems that seems to get harder and harder the more you study it. Just the underlying numbers themselves are pretty terrifying: a 100-amino-acid protein (some go up to 30,000 amino acids) has 198 dihedral bond angles; if each of those can have three stable conformations, that gives the small matter of 3198 different conformations for the protein to adopt.