But Crispr actually edited genes. How much of this theoretical work was real, and how much was slop? Did the grad students actually achieve confirmation of their conformational predictions?
Surprisingly, yes the predicted structures from AlphaFold had functional groups that fit with experimental data of binding partners and homologues. While I don't know whether it matched with the actual crystallization, it did match with those orthogonal experiments (these were cell biology, genetics, and molecular biology labs, not protein structure labs, so they didn't try to actually crystalize the proteins themselves).
