Computational Biology Research Center[CBRC]

released on 22th Dec, 2008

　　CASP8 (8^th Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) meeting was held at Sardinia, Italy from December 3 to December 7. In CASP8, 128 targets, which were only information of protein sequence, had been released for about three months since the beginning of May, participants submitted their predictions. In this meeting, researchers that are interested in predicting protein structure gathered from around the world, and they actively discussed the results of contest and prediction method.
　　The main goal of CASP is to obtain an in-depth and objective assessment of current abilities and inabilities in the area of protein structure prediction. In CASP8 meeting, the assessment of prediction method and exciting discussion was held in eight categories as below.

• Template modeling

  structure prediction of easy target, which has sequence similarity with known structure

• Free modeling

  structure prediction of difficult target, which does not detect similar fold

• Refinement

  template model refinement

• Structural domains assignments

  domain prediction

• Disordered regions

  disordered region prediction

• Residue-residue contacts

  residue-residue contacts prediction

• Quality assessment

  prediction of expected quality of a model

• Binding sites prediction

  biologically relevant ligand binding site prediction

　　Two team from CBRC participated in CASP8: CBRC-DP_DR (Noguchi, Yamada, Shimizu, Hirose) in Structural domains assignments and Disordered regions, and CBRC_POODLE (Hirose, Shimizu, Noguchi) in Disordered regions. CBRC-DP_DR was ranked at top groups in both categories. Receiving high acclaim for prediction result of key targets, CBRC_POODLE did oral presentation.

CASP8 web site