Iddo Friedberg's Lab – Eclecticism is a feature, not a bug

Eclecticism is a feature, not a bug
Protein Function Prediction A major interest of ours is the prediction of protein function. Genomics, proteomics and various other ``-omics'' inundate us with sequence and structure information, but the biological functions of those proteins in many cases still eludes us. Computational prediction of protein and gene function is a rapidly growing research field in bioinformatics [1]. Our lab co-organizes the automated computational protein function prediction meetings: AFP. The AFP meetings bring together researchers to discuss various methods for protein function prediction. We also co-organize the Critical Assessment of Function Annotation, or CAFA. CAFA is an experiment designed to provide a large-scale assessment of computational methods dedicated to predicting protein function. Different algorithms are evaluated by their ability to predict the Gene Ontology (GO) terms in the categories of Molecular Function, Biological Process, and Cellular Component. The latest iteration of CAFA took place on the Kaggle website, with a record number of over 2,500 participants.