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Title: Protein secondary structure prediction continues to rise
Author:Burkhard Rost
Quote: J Structural Biology, 2001, 134:204-218

Abstract for 'Protein secondary structure prediction continues to rise'

Methods predicting protein secondary structure have improved substantially in the 90's through using evolutionary information taken from the divergence of proteins in the same structural family. Recently, the evolutionary information resulting from improved searches and larger databases has again boosted prediction accuracy by more than four percentage points to its current height around 76% of all residues predicted correctly in one of the three states helix, strand, other. The last year also brought successful new concepts to the field. These new methods may be particularly interesting in light of the improvements achieved through simply combining existing methods. Divergent evolutionary profiles not only contain enough information to substantially improve prediction accuracy, but even to correctly predict long stretches of identical residues observed in alternative secondary structure states depending on non local conditions. An example is a method automatically identifying structural switches, and thus finding a remarkable connection between predicted secondary structure and aspects of function. Secondary structure predictions are increasingly becoming the working horse for numerous methods aiming at predicting protein structure and function. Is the recent increase in accuracy significant enough to make predictions even more useful? Since the recent improvement yields a better prediction of segments, and in particular of beta-strands, I believe the answer is affirmative. What is the limit of prediction accuracy? We shall see.



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