Simply knowing the DNA sequence isn’t enough to know how a protein works. Instead, you need to understand how it folds. Its shape, formed by this knotted folding, is core to its function: collagen in our tendons has a rope-like structure, while enzymes have pockets to hold the molecules they act on. And yet, in advance, there was no means of knowing how this would happen. If you used traditional brute-force computation, which involves systematically trying all the possibilities, it might take longer than the age of the known universe to run through all the possible shapes of a given protein.
