CASP8 is ramping up with a handful of targets released last week, and many more expected this week. The reason you haven't seen many CASP8 work units as we are making a final benchmarking of all the new structure prediction protocols we have developed over the past two years in the new miniRosetta code framework. The testing is on CASP7 targets--we want to determine which of our new methods are best before going all out on the CASP8 targets (yes, we would like to have completed the benchmarking before casp8 started, but there has been so much to do!). the testing should be complete monday and tuesday, and based on these results we will be sending out primarly casp8 work units next week using the approaches the tests currently running show are most successful.

I can't emphasize enough how critical all of your contributions are to our efforts to improve protein structure prediction methods! we have had many ideas on potential improvements which we have implemented, but the only way to know whether we are actually getting closer to the truth is to do rigorous testing (the casp7 targets for which we now know the structures are a perfect test set), and this would quite simply be impossible without your contributions! -- David Baker

from DB's Journal