Protein structure prediction center in CASP8

Abstract

We present an outline of the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) infrastructure implemented at the University of California, Davis, Protein Structure Prediction Center. The infrastructure supports selection and validation of prediction targets, collection of predictions, standard evaluation of submitted predictions, and presentation of results. The Center also supports information exchange relating to CASP experiments and structure prediction in general. Technical aspects of conducting the CASP8 experiment and relevant statistics are also provided.

Figure 1

The number of targets released for prediction in eight consecutive CASP experiments. In CASP8, 128 targets were split into 57 human/server and 71 server-only targets.

Figure 2

The number of predictions submitted for evaluation in eight consecutive CASP experiments. Compared to CASP7, CASP8 registered a more than two-fold increase in the number of predictions in the non-tertiary structure categories.

Figure 3

An overall view of the CASP8 standard evaluation results available at the Prediction Center. For the analysis performed by the CASP8 independent assessors the reader is referred to other papers in this issue. RASMOL and SPICE can be referenced in and, respectively.