text: user12686: I am absolutely new to Structural Bioinformatics (I 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:
  https://bip.weizmann.ac.il/course/structbioinfo/pdf/SecondaryStructurePrediction_WIS.pdf
  Only a handful of books or articles talk about protein structure Assignments:
  https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.02.429329v1
  Can anyone tell me what is the basic difference between Assignment and Prediction?
  Kindly explain with examples.
  
  user6322: To make it crystal clear (and make than pun):
  
  Assignment: a 3D structure is known and the residues are assigned a secondary structure
  Prediction: an algorithm predicts from linear (primary) sequence what the secondary structure may be —often incorrectly. This can be homology based, covariance, deep learning etc. But most commonly just the vector norm of window residue composition, e.g. proline is never in a helix and helices and sheets have different periodicity (two for a sheet and three and a bit for a helix).
  
  
original_text: 12686: <p>I am absolutely new to Structural Bioinformatics (I only started last week). I am working on the secondary structure assignment/prediction (actually I am not sure) of proteins using ML.</p>
  <p>When it comes to protein analysis, most of the books or research papers talk about protein structure <strong>Prediction</strong>:</p>
  <p><a href="https://bip.weizmann.ac.il/course/structbioinfo/pdf/SecondaryStructurePrediction_WIS.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://bip.weizmann.ac.il/course/structbioinfo/pdf/SecondaryStructurePrediction_WIS.pdf</a></p>
  <p>Only a handful of books or articles talk about protein structure <strong>Assignments</strong>:</p>
  <p><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.02.429329v1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.02.429329v1</a></p>
  <p>Can anyone tell me what is the basic difference between Assignment and Prediction?</p>
  <p>Kindly explain with examples.</p>
   6322: <p>To make it crystal clear (and make than pun):</p>
  <ul>
  <li><code>Assignment</code>: a 3D structure is known and the residues are <em>assigned</em> a secondary structure</li>
  <li><code>Prediction</code>: an algorithm predicts from linear (primary) sequence what the secondary structure may be —often incorrectly. This can be homology based, covariance, deep learning etc. But most commonly just the vector norm of window residue composition, e.g. proline is never in a helix and helices and sheets have different periodicity (two for a sheet and three and a bit for a helix).</li>
  </ul>
  