CASP
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CASP, which stands for Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction, is a community-wide experiment (though it is commonly referred to as a competition) for protein structure prediction taking place every two years.
CASP provides research groups with an opportunity to assess the quality of their methods for protein structure prediction from the primary structure of the protein. As a consequence, CASP provides the research community with an assessment of the state of the art in this field.
Protein structures that have been recently resolved, but not yet published, are used as targets for the evaluation. If the given sequence is found (for example, using sequence alignment methods such as BLAST or FASTA) to be similar to a protein sequence of known structure, comparative protein modelling may be used to predict the tertiary structure. Otherwise, other methods such as protein threading or de novo protein structure prediction must be applied. The results of CASP are published [1] (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/106558999) and are divided into several prediction categories:
- secondary structure prediction
- homology modelling
- fold recognition (also called protein threading)
- contact prediction
- de novo structure prediction
- function prediction
External links
CASP experiments home page (http://predictioncenter.llnl.gov/)