Rodrigo Ochoa attended the 7th CAPRI Evaluation Meeting held at EMBL-EBI, where he shares his insights on the event.
The 7th version of the CAPRI Evaluation meeting was held at EMBL-EBI during the first week of April. Different experts from academia and industry shared their experiences through talks explaining the performance of their tools, as well as poster presentations with new initiatives and applications in the field. Known and new competitors reported their results for the prediction of conformations and scores of protein-protein, protein-peptide and even protein sugar interactions. The feedback was incredible, and the assessment of easy and difficult targets will provide valuable insights to improve current, future and even out-of-the-box methods such as the twitter-based strategy explained by Dr. Alexandre Bonvin.
The keynote speakers offered great talks in topics associated to the field, for example, meta-analysis of GPCRs, massive peptide screenings, study of protein assemblies and novel tendencies using massive sets of folding data and deep learning techniques. The latest motivates the inclusion of robust statistical methods with well-known theoretical formalities to infer new knowledge that can impact the predictions and challenges of future CAPRI rounds.
Delegates had the opportunity to attend a round table about aspects that should be improved or maintained for next competitions. This included a new submission portal developed at EMBL-EBI by the PDBe group, which has the advice of experts involved in the assessment and submission of predictions.
The event was also ideal to network with almost 90 attendees who are actively participating in the community. Poster sessions and additional activities promoted the establishment of new collaborations. For example, we had the chance to dine in one of the beautiful colleges in town, Homerton College and also join a punting tour during the final day to learn a little of Cambridge history.
Overall, a promising future awaits the CAPRI community due to the number of motivated participants as well as the quality of their contributions.
