title: iFC²: an integrated web-server for improved prediction of protein structural class, fold type, and secondary structure content.
abstract: Several descriptors of protein structure at the sequence and residue levels have been recently proposed. They are widely adopted in the analysis and prediction of structural and functional characteristics of proteins. Numerous in silico methods have been developed for sequence-based prediction of these descriptors. However, many of them do not have a public web-server and only a few integrate multiple descriptors to improve the predictions. We introduce iFC² (integrated prediction of fold, class, and content) server that is the first to integrate three modern predictors of sequence-level descriptors. They concern fold type (PFRES), structural class (SCEC), and secondary structure content (PSSC-core). The server exploits relations between the three descriptors to implement a cross-evaluation procedure that improves over the predictions of the individual methods. The iFC² annotates fold and class predictions as potentially correct/incorrect. When tested on datasets with low-similarity chains, for the fold prediction iFC² labels 82% of the PFRES predictions as correct and the accuracy of these predictions equals 72%. The accuracy of the remaining 28% of the PFRES predictions equals 38%. Similarly, our server assigns correct labels for over 79% of SCEC predictions, which are shown to be 98% accurate, while the remaining SCEC predictions are only 15% accurate. These results are shown to be competitive when contrasted against recent relevant web-servers. Predictions on CASP8 targets show that the content predicted by iFC² is competitive when compared with the content computed from the tertiary structures predicted by three best-performing methods in CASP8. The iFC² server is available at http://biomine.ece.ualberta.ca/1D/1D.html .
authors: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
authors: Ke
authors: K
authors: Chen
authors: Wojciech
authors: W
authors: Stach
authors: Leila
authors: L
authors: Homaeian
authors: Lukasz
authors: L
authors: Kurgan
mesh_terms: D030562:Databases, Protein; D020407:Internet; D017510:Protein Folding; D017433:Protein Structure, Secondary; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins