The NovaFold Antibody algorithm utilizes a combination of homology modeling and ab initio loop prediction, resulting in highly accurate predictions. During modeling, NovaFold Antibody searches the input sequence(s) against thousands of non-redundant protein antibody structures from PDB and finds the best template matches for the chain or complex.

During modeling, NovaFold Antibody gives particular consideration to the complementary determining region (CDR) loops, hypervariable regions of an antibody that react dominantly with an antigen. The three CDR loops on the heavy chain are known as H1, H2 and H3, while the three on the light chain are L1, L2 and L3. H3 is commonly the most important region in antigen binding. Due to its increased length and flexibility, it is also the most difficult to model. As such, NovaFold Antibody limits H3 loop modeling to fifteen or fewer residues, a length commonly seen in antibody modeling problems. Finally, NovaFold Antibody performs energy minimization calculations to construct the final predicted structure model for the antibody chain or complex. This entire process takes approximately 5-15 minutes on a standard workstation computer.