Besides a couple of shouts on BOINCstats, cryptic threads on Rosetta and some rumors of a grand summer-long crunch-a-thon involving something or another about protein folding, I can find no solid information on CASP8. . . just exactly what is CASP8 about?

. . . how does it affect BOINCers?

From the POEM website:

CASP sends out information for proteins which have "unknown" structures. These are given to test the predictive power of protein modeling software to see how accurate it is, and used as a benchmark to track advances in structure prediction methodology. At the end of the challenge, the predicted structures are compared to the actual laboratory structural analysis by spectroscopists crystallographers of the real protein to assess the results.

More information on CASP8 can be found here. [url]http://www.predictioncenter.org/casp8/index.cgi[/url/

Besides a couple of shouts on BOINCstats, cryptic threads on Rosetta and some rumors of a grand summer-long crunch-a-thon involving something or another about protein folding, I can find no solid information on CASP8. . . just exactly what is CASP8 about?

. . . how does it affect BOINCers?

Found this link that answers a lot of the questions on CASP8:


CASP8 [8th Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction ] is a symposium to evaluate the state of the art on using computer models to predict protein structure.


CASP8 will particularly address the following questions:

*Are the models produced similar to the corresponding experimental structure?

*Is the mapping of the target sequence onto the proposed structure (i.e. the alignment) correct?

*Have similar structures that a model can be based on been identified?

*Are comparative models more accurate than can be obtained by simply copying the best template?

*Has there been progress from the earlier CASPs?

*What methods are most effective?

*Where can future effort be most productively focused?

This post explains what CASP is about:

CASP is a contest of sorts. Different teams of scientists take on the challenge of offering their best predictions for a set of proteins where their structural shape is not yet known. It is a blind prediction.

In other words no one yet knows the "correct" answer. But we will soon. And at that point the answers can be "graded" if you will, and the most accurate prediction can be determined. CASP runs every 2 years, and is basically a test to demonstrate the scientific advancements of the past 2 years.

That is the most lucent explanation I have seen.