Skoltech researchers Marina Pak, Ilya Vorobyev and Dmitry Ivankov have co-authored a recent preprint “Using AlphaFold to predict the impact of single mutations on protein stability and function”. The authors assayed the ability of AlphaFold to predict the impact of single mutations on protein stability (ΔΔG) and function. They extracted metrics from AlphaFold predictions before and after a single mutation in a protein and correlated the predicted change with the experimentally known ΔΔG values. Additionally, we correlated the AlphaFold predictions on the impact of a single mutation on structure with a large scale dataset of single mutations in GFP with the experimentally assayed levels of fluorescence. They found a very weak or no correlation between AlphaFold output metrics and change of protein stability or fluorescence. The scientists conclude that AlphaFold cannot be immediately applied to applications in protein folding or prediction of single substitution effects. Full text of the preprint is available here.