CASP

CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction; dt: critical review of techniques for protein structure prediction ) is a 1994 biennial forming community experiment ( often referred to as competition ), hosted by the University of California, Davis and supported by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National library of Medicine.

CASP provides research groups the opportunity to test the quality of their methods for prediction of protein structures starting from the primary structure and to gain an overview of the current status of this field of research.

For this purpose, not yet published protein structures are used as input for the calculations and then compared the results of the calculations with experimental laboratory data. Will it (for example, using sequence alignment methods such as BLAST or FASTA ) found similarities to known proteins can be attempted through comparative protein modeling to predict the tertiary structure. Otherwise, must be used for this purpose methods such as the de novo structure prediction.

The CASP results are published in different categories.

Some of the participating groups employ tools of distributed computing to improve their methods constantly and test (eg, Rosetta @ home, POEM @ home).