Functional inferences from blind ab initio protein structure predictions

Ab initio protein structure prediction methods have improved dramatically i n the past several years. Because these methods require only the sequence o f the protein of interest, they are potentially applicable to the open read ing frames in the many organisms whose sequences have been and will be dete rmined. Ab initio methods cannot currently produce models of high enough re solution for use in rational drug design, but there is an exciting potentia l for using the methods for functional annotation of protein sequences on a genomic scale. Here we illustrate how functional insights can be obtained from low-resolution predicted structures using examples from blind ab initi o structure predictions from the third and fourth critical assessment of st ructure prediction (CASP3, CASP4) experiments. (C) 2001 Academic Press.