Every two years, the Protein Structure Prediction Center organises a community-wide experiment (CASP) to compare the programs and methods for predicting protein structure. The eighth one is this year and the results will be discussed in a meeting in early December!
Some high flyers from the last experiment are:
I-TASSER
Rosetta
Protein Structure Prediction by Global Optimization
For a list of the results talks, click here.
I think that there should also be a special prize for the cutest acronym. My current vote in the protein modeling field is 3D-GARDEN – which is a system for modelling protein-protein complexes.
Bronwen,
Putting ‘CASP’ in your text and tags might make this post more visible to those of us in the know :)
Richard: Thanks for spotting the oversight. CASP was the “keyword” from the talk and was all over the website so when I read your comment I thought: “But surely I included it…” but I hadn’t.
(For the latecomers – I have very slightly edited the post; actually: perhaps suggest other things that I really should have put in and we can allow it to evolve…)
While this is a little above my head, the concept of comparing computational protein structures with reality (X-ray crystallography??) in an objective way is marvellous. They do something similar with the algorithms used in commercial chess programs. While I realise that computational approaches like this have so far been less successful then hoped in finding cures, the theoretical underpinning is improving all the time, so it seems only a matter of time… Thanks for pointing out a great resource, Bronwen.