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?
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.