Everybody wins. The scientific publication process is not ideal to find the best bioinformatics methodology for a given problem. Most predictions are not performed blind as our data sets are so small that separating them in to several disjoints sets for training and testing purposes is not possible or sensible. The structural biology community has started to tackle the problems by establishing a competition called Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP). For example, the solution of the 3D structure of a protein is announced but the data withheld for a couple of months to give computational groups time to submit a prediction which is then evaluated by an independent team. A concluding conferences crowns the best prediction groups. In recent years, systems biology and sequence interpretation produce sufficient data to make similar challenges possible. Continue reading →