Center for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediciton

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Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. Project Summary (no changes): The primary goal of this project is to provide the infrastructure for the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) program, dedicated to the objective evaluation of macromolecular structure modeling methods. Extensive knowledge of protein and RNA structures will significantly aid the investigation of macromolecular function, interactions, and biochemical pathways. It will also have a major impact on the understanding of biology and human disease, and eventually on drug design. Experimental determination of structure is inherently time-consuming and costly. For macromolecules that have not been addressed by experiment, a computational modeling approach often provides an alternative. Modeling methods, however, are continually evolving and vary in their effectiveness. The CASP process was established to answer two main questions: First, what level of modeling quality can be expected of these techniques? And second, which methods offer the most promise for continued development? CASP is a community-wide program, with over 200 research groups world-wide submitting over 85,000 predictions in the last round. Our group is the primary infrastructure resource for CASP, and handles processing of predictions, develops and implements evaluation software, performs prediction assessment, develops analysis and display tools, and facilitates access to predictions and their evaluation data. We propose to support the current biennial operation of CASP and to expand it by the addition of assessments performed on a continuing basis. To increase the supply of interesting modeling targets we will systematically broaden the network of collaborating crystallography and NMR spectroscopy research groups, including new centers dedicated to the determination of structure of membrane proteins. The expanded network will also be capable of providing the still rare RNA structures, allowing extension of CASP to the assessment of RNA structure modeling. To help overcome the most significant obstacles to progress in structure prediction, we will add a class of specialized assessments focused on specific stages of the modeling process, providing a means of evaluating the performance of these individual steps. Finally, we will place special emphasis on interactions with teachers and researchers throughout academia, with the goal of disseminating the insights and wealth of data gained through CASP.