Detection of reliable and unexpected protein fold predictions using 3D-Jury.

3D-Jury is a fully automated protein structure meta prediction system accessible via the Meta Server interface (http://BioInfo.PL/Meta). This is one of the meta predictors, which have made a dramatic, unprecedented impact on the last CASP-5 experiment. The 3D-Jury is comparable with other meta servers but it has the highest combined specificity and sensitivity. The presented method is also very simple and versatile and can be used to create meta predictions even from sets of models produced by humans. An additional and very important and novel feature of the system is the high correlation between the reported confidence score and the accuracy of the model. The number of correctly predicted residues can be estimated directly from the prediction score. The high reliability of the method enables any biologist to submit a target of interest to the Meta Server and screen with relatively high confidence, whether the target can be predicted by fold recognition methods while being unpredictable using standard approaches like PSI-Blast. This can point to interesting relationships which could have been missed in annotations of proteins or genomes and provide very valuable information for novel scientific discoveries.