Crissan Harris: Predicting Protein Structure -- CASP7

Crissan Harris is a rising senior at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is double majoring in Bioinformatics and Math, and plans to integrate these two fields in her career. She participated in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Information Technology sponsored by the NSF. Working under the supervision of Professor Kevin Karplus in the Protein Bioinformatics Lab, she was able to participate in the CASP7 experiment.

CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) is a community-wide experiment where leading researchers in the field of bioinformatics use computational methods to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein given only the amino-acid sequence. The structures of these target proteins have been solved experimentally by either crystallography or NMR spectroscopy, but the results are kept from being released until after CASP is over. The goal of CASP is to obtain an accurate and objective assessment of the current abilities in the field of computational structure prediction. Crissan was able to be a part of the CASP7 team, and participated in creating the three-dimensional protein structures that were submitted to CASP for assessment and scoring. The results of this experiment are released in November, and groups with the most accurate and interesting predictions will receive invitations to give talks at the CASP meeting. Kevin Karplus' group has done well in the past and has been asked to give a talk at the past 5 CASP meetings.