Critical assessment of methods of protein structure prediction (CASP)—Round XIII

CASP (critical assessment of structure prediction) assesses the state of the art in modeling protein structure from amino acid sequence. The most recent experiment (CASP13 held in 2018) saw dramatic progress in structure modeling without use of structural templates (historically "ab initio" modeling). Progress was driven by the successful application of deep learning techniques to predict inter-residue distances. In turn, these results drove dramatic improvements in three-dimensional structure accuracy: With the proviso that there are an adequate number of sequences known for the protein family, the new methods essentially solve the long-standing problem of predicting the fold topology of monomeric proteins.…