Fragment based protein fold prediction has been the most successful strategy in the latest CASP7 protein fold assessment experiment. Methods relying on fragment libraries also show great promise in designing new protein folds as Steve pointed out with his "Jetpacks, Enzymes And Jetpacks!" post (the Nature paper with the computationally designed and then optimised fold). However, what's been missing is a good quality public fragment library for any protein fold predicting group to experiment with (the CASP winning lot are naturally not giving theirs out).

This week's PLoS Computational Biology describes exactly such a fragment library: "Reconstruction of Protein Backbones from the BriX Collection of Canonical Protein Fragments" by Baeten et al. This is exciting stuff and could well heat up the competition in CASP8!