Blind prediction experiments CASP

Theoretical predictions are risky. Therefore for almost all such prediction experimental validation is required. Nevertheless, often the models can indicate appropriate ways for validation or further experiments. These experiments can be expected to be time-consuming, and expensive. Furthermore, the protein actually needs to be available for the suggested experiments. All of this limits the applicability of experimental validation. Therefore, it is mandatory to reduce errors as much as possible and to indicate the expected error range via computer-based predictions. This is not a trivial problem for structure prediction, though. An estimation of the performance and accuracy of the respective methods can be obtained from large scale comparative benchmarking, from successful blind predictions and from a community wide assessment experiment (CASP [109, 229]/ CAFASP [283]). These are addressed in turn in the following ... 

A blind prediction is a computer-based construction of 3D models of a protein sequence for which no structure is known at the time. CASP (comparative assessment of structure prediction methods [109, 274-276]) is a worldwide contest of protein structure prediction that takes place every two years. During the CASP experiments, a set of automated numerical evaluation tools have been implemented [110, 111, 277, 278] to cope with the large number of predictions in a way that is as objective as possible. In fact, the experiment is also devoted to the research and development of such unbiased methods. However, there is still quite some controversy on the criteria to judge protein structure predictions and the corresponding models [339]. 

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