CASP10, and the Future of Structure in Biology

I recently had the fortune of attending the 10th Community Assessment of protein Structure Prediction, or CASP, as it is affectionately known. CASP is a competition of sorts that happens once every two years to ascertain the progress made in computationally predicting protein structure. It is a blind experiment, where the structures to be predicted are unknown beforehand, and thus serves as a unbiased test of the predictive power of current computational methods. It is in many ways a model that the rest of computational biology ought (and is starting) to follow.