CASP
CASP ( Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction dt .: critical review of techniques for protein structure prediction ) is a 1994 biennial forming joint experiment (often referred to as competition), hosted by the University of California, Davis and supported by the National Institutes of Health and the US National Library of Medicine .
CASP offers research groups the opportunity to test the quality of their methods for predicting protein structures based on the primary structure and to get an overview of the current status in this research area.
For this purpose, protein structures that have not yet been published are used as specifications for the calculations and the results of the calculations are then compared with experimental laboratory results. If similarities to known proteins are found (for example using sequence alignment methods such as BLAST or FASTA ), an attempt can be made to predict the tertiary structure using comparative protein modeling . Otherwise, methods such as de novo structure prediction must be used for this purpose .
The CASP results are categorized and published.
Some of the participating groups use distributed computing tools in order to continuously improve and test their methods (e.g. Rosetta @ home , POEM @ home ).