What is the difference between Assignment and Prediction?

Question

[user366312]

I am absolutely new to Structural Bioinformatics (only started last week). I am working on the secondary structure assignment/prediction (actually I am not sure) of proteins using ML.

When it comes to protein analysis, most of the books or research papers talk about protein structure Prediction. Only a handful of books or articles talk about protein structure Assignments.

Can anyone tell me what is the basic difference between Assignment and Prediction?

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

Assignments are made from known 3D structures, and are fairly straightforward. Predictions are made without 3D structures. They are usually based on residue conservation profiles that are extracted from multiple sequence alignments.

[user366312]

What are the inputs or features used in the case of Protein Structure Assignment?

[Mensur Dlakic]

Atomic coordinates from PDB files are typically used for this purpose.

• https://www.rcsb.org/