A critical assessment of the secondary structure alpha-helices and their termini in proteins.
Secondary structure prediction from amino acid sequence is a key component of protein structure prediction, with current accuracy at approximately 75%. We analysed two state-of-the-art secondary structure prediction methods, PHD and JPRED, comparing predictions with secondary structure assigned by the algorithms DSSP and STRIDE. The specific focus of our study was alpha-helix N-termini, as empirical free energy scales are available for residue preferences at N-terminal positions. Although these prediction methods perform well in general at predicting the alpha-helical locations and length distributions in proteins, they perform less well at predicting the correct helical termini. For example, although most predicted alpha-helices overlap a real alpha-helix (with relatively few completely missed or extra predicted helices), only one-third of JPRED and PHD predictions correctly identify the N-terminus. Analysis of neighbouring N-terminal sequences to predicted helical N-termini shows that the correct N-terminus is often within one or two residues. More importantly, the true N-terminal motif is, on average, more favourable as judged by our experimentally measured free energies. This suggests a simple, but powerful, strategy to improve secondary structure prediction using empirically derived energies to adjust the predicted output to a more favourable N-terminal sequence.
Department of Biomolecular Sciences, UMIST, P.O. Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD, UK.
Claire L
CL
Wilson
Simon J
SJ
Hubbard
Andrew J
AJ
Doig
D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000596:Amino Acids / Q000032:analysis; D030562:Databases, Protein; D020407:Internet; D017433:Protein Structure, Secondary; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein; D016008:Statistical Distributions; D013816:Thermodynamics
D000596:Amino Acids; D011506:Proteins