Update on protein structure prediction: results of the 1995 IRBM workshop

Computational tools for protein structure prediction are of great interest to molecular, structural and theoretical biologists due to a rapidly increasing number of protein sequences with no known structure. In October 1995, a workshop was held at IRBM to predict as much as possible about a number of proteins of biological interest using ab initio prediction of fold recognition methods, 112 protein sequences were collected via an open invitation for target submissions. 17 were selected for prediction during the workshop and for 11 of these a prediction of some reliability could be made. We believe that his was a worthwhile experiment showing that the use of a range of independent prediction methods and thorough use of existing databases can lead to credible and useful ab initio structure predictions.