Alignments grow, secondary structure prediction improves.

TitleAlignments grow, secondary structure prediction improves.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2002
AuthorsPrzybylski, D, Rost, B
JournalProteins
Volume46
Issue2
Pagination197-205
Date Published2002 Feb 1
ISSN0887-3585
KeywordsDatabases, Protein, Protein Structure, Secondary, Sequence Alignment
Abstract

Using information from sequence alignments significantly improves protein secondary structure prediction. Typically, more divergent profiles yield better predictions. Recently, various groups have shown that accuracy can be improved significantly by using PSI-BLAST profiles to develop new prediction methods. Here, we focused on the influences of various alignment strategies on two 8-year-old PHD methods. The following results stood out. (i) PHD using pairwise alignments predicts about 72% of all residues correctly in one of the three states: helix, strand, and other. Using larger databases and PSI-BLAST raised accuracy to 75%. (ii) More than 60% of the improvement originated from the growth of current sequence databases; about 20% resulted from detailed changes in the alignment procedure (substitution matrix, thresholds, and gap penalties). Another 20% of the improvement resulted from carefully using iterated PSI-BLAST searches. (iii) It is of interest that we failed to improve prediction accuracy further when attempting to refine the alignment by dynamic programming (MaxHom and ClustalW). (iv) Improvement through family growth appears to saturate at some point. However, most families have not reached this saturation. Hence, we anticipate that prediction accuracy will continue to rise with database growth.

Alternate JournalProteins
PubMed ID11807948
Grant ListR01-GM63029-01 / GM / NIGMS NIH HHS / United States