Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

• This year we have very successfully participated in the blind assessment of protein structure prediction methods exercise CASP13. We have evaluated the performance of several knowledge-based potentials for protein model quality and protein docking, small-angle scattering approaches Pepsi-SAXS and Pepsi-SANS, cross-linking developments, methods based on normal mode analysis and more. Our team was ranked 1st in three data-assisted CASP13 sub-challenges (SAXS, SANS, and crosslinks), and got into the top-10 predictors in the main category of the prediction of regular targets. We were also interviewed on this subject by the Le Figaro newspaper [88].

• The OneAngström startup was created this year around the development of the SAMSON software platform. Four team members have joined the startup : Stephane Redon, Jocelyn Gate, Dmitriy Marin, and Yassine Naimi.

• Our Ananas analytical symmetry detection method [70] was used in the official assessment of protein assemblies in CASP13 and was also transferred to the PDBe European resource for the collection, organisation and dissemination of data on biological macromolecular structures [30].

Awards

• Our paper "Analytical symmetry detection in protein assemblies. II. Dihedral and cubic symmetries" covered the September 2018 issue of the Journal of Structural Biology [20].

• Our paper "A novel fast Fourier transform accelerated off-grid exhaustive search method for cryo-electron microscopy fitting" covered the the August 2017 issue of Journal of Applied Crystallography [58].

• Our paper "NOLB: Nonlinear Rigid Block Normal Mode Analysis Method" covered May 2017 issue of Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation [57].

• Our predictions were ranked 1st in the SAXS-assisted category of the CASP13 protein structure prediction challenge (cumulative SAXS-assisted z-scores).

• Our predictions were ranked 1st in the SANS-assisted category of the CASP13 protein structure prediction challenge (cumulative SANS-assisted z-scores).

• Our predictions were ranked 1st in the X-link-assisted category of the CASP13 protein structure prediction challenge (cumulative X-link-assisted z-scores).