EVA: EValuation of Automatic protein structure prediction

Objectives

CASP addresses the question ‘how well can experts predict protein structure if given sufficient incentive to do so?’. In contrast, the question addressed by EVA is ‘how well could molecular biologists predict protein structure, if they simply take the output from the programs out there?’. Thus, the goals are:

Technical aspects

Methods covered

In its first implementation, EVA should address the following fields of protein structure prediction:
  1. Predictions of protein structure in 1D (secondary structure, solvent accessibility)
  2. Predictions of protein structure in 2D (inter-residue distances)
  3. Predictions of protein structure in 3D (homology modelling)
  4. Prediction of protein structure in 3D- , i.e. threading results that may imply 3D predictions but may actually never go the entire way, but may be restricted to stating ‘A is similar to B’.
  5. Predictions of novel folds.

Soon after EVA will be running, we hope to extend it to also cover other aspects of protein structure, such as membrane regions, signal peptides, cleavage sites, may be structural/functional motifs (others to be added to the list).

Framework

EVA could physically be located in a particular place, or could be shared between various labs involved in the effort. Currently, we favour to have it running on one particular machine, and to install various WWW mirrors for the output. It may be reasonable to request some financial help to pull it online. At this moment, we envision that EVA would be realised by a few people who actually are willing to spend resources on the issue. Apart from that we should hope that there will be a slightly larger group of people who are on the ‘board’ of the service, i.e. who contribute their experience, their tools, their ideas, and their support.