A December 1996 meeting was a culmination of a 9 month long, community wide
experiment in objective testing of the structure prediction methods. Before the
meeting, 42 structural targets provided by crystallographers and NMR
spectroscopists were made available to the prediction community. For the first
time targets in the docking category were included in addition to those in
comparative modeling, fold recognition, and ab initio folding. Prior to the
public release of structures, more than 900 predictions by approximately
70 research groups world wide were collected.
Verification of the prediction targets,
the submission formats, and the development of software for the automatic
evaluation of predictions was done by Aron Marchler-Bauer, NLM, Ceslovas
Venclovas and Adam Zemla, Protein Structure Prediction Center.
Independent assessors
this time were Janet Thornton, University College, London, for comparative
modeling, Michael Levitt, Stanford University, for fold recognition, and
Arthur Lesk, University of Cambridge Clinical School, for ab initio predictions.