Yang Zhang wins worldwide CASP competition
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September 14, 2006
Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) is a biannual worldwide competition in blind protein structure prediction. In this competition, the organizers solicit new unpublished protein structures from the experimentalists and offer the sequences to the community of modelers for blind prediction. The CASP competition is the most high-profile event in computational structural biology and bioinformatics.
The Center for Bioinformatics is extremely proud and excited that one of its own, Assistant Professor Yang Zhang, won this year CASP7 in the most important and prestigious category - automated server predictions. The automated predictions do not involve human intervention, thus allowing objective evaluation of the prediction methodologies. As such, they are the most respected ones by the scientific community.
The prediction season ended in August and, as of September 13, most of the CASP7 targets (experimental structures) have been released. Based on a variety of automated evaluations, the Zhang-Server performed significantly better than all other automated servers in the field. Although the evaluation results are still not official, Zhang’s significant lead (5-10% better than the second best computer server of other groups) guarantees his first place.
Dr. Zhang just completed his first year (!) on the faculty as an assistant professor and we at the Center are wondering what to expect from him in the future! The Center invites all the colleagues to join us in congratulating him with this huge success.
