How is Protinfo different from other approaches?

Protein structure prediction is an active area of research, and no one method or methodology is "best" for all situations. The public success of projects like Folding@Home, POEM@Home, Human Proteome Folding, and Rosetta@Home are evidence of the interest in solving this computationally challenging problem. We wish to offer another approach that differs in certain subtle but significant ways that can provide complementary and competitive results.

Some approaches (like Folding@Home and POEM@Home) simulate the protein folding process as we believe it occurs in real life, where physical energies are minimized. Protinfo (like Human Proteome Folding and Rosetta@Home) uses a minimization of "statistical energies" to identify likely protein structures, but with a slightly different approach. Rather than relying on a single complex energy function, Protinfo uses a simple, easily evaluated function and chooses the best structures by following up with a set of more sophisticated functions. Another difference is that Protinfo uses a novel continuous sampling methodology that enables us to explore good structures more finely. The continuous sampling methodology incurs little memory overhead and evaluating our compact energy function is very fast. This allows Protinfo to run on almost any computer.

The Protinfo structure predictions have been ranked as some of the best by the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition since 1994. You can read more about Protinfo on the researchers' page about this project.