CASP 15 - MSAs Strike Back

CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) is a bi-annual challenge on protein structure modeling. In 2020, AlphaFold 2 revolutionized the field of protein structure prediction winning the CASP 14 challenge by a huge margin using Geometric Deep Learning. This weekend the results of CASP 15 were announced - what do we see there after glancing through the abstracts?

In short, multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) do no go anywhere and still are the main component of winning approaches. Most of the top models are based on AlphaFold 2 (and its Multimer version) with many tweaks here and there. Protein LM-based folding like ESM Fold (popular for not needing MSAs) seems to be far away from the top. More reflections by Ezgi Karaca and Sergey Ovchinnikov