Title
Improved topology prediction using the terminal hydrophobic helices rule.
Abstract
Motivation: The translocon recognizes sufficiently hydrophobic regions of a protein and inserts them into the membrane. Computational methods try to determine what hydrophobic regions are recognized by the translocon. Although these predictions are quite accurate, many methods still fail to distinguish marginally hydrophobic transmembrane (TM) helices and equally hydrophobic regions in soluble protein domains. In vivo, this problem is most likely avoided by targeting of the TM-proteins, so that non-TM proteins never see the translocon. Proteins are targeted to the translocon by an N-terminal signal peptide. The targeting is also aided by the fact that the N-terminal helix is more hydrophobic than other TM-helices. In addition, we also recently found that the C-terminal helix is more hydrophobic than central helices. This information has not been used in earlier topology predictors. Results: Here, we use the fact that the N- and C-terminal helices are more hydrophobic to develop a new version of the first-principle-based topology predictor, SCAMPI. The new predictor has two main advantages; first, it can be used to efficiently separate membrane and non-membrane proteins directly without the use of an extra prefilter, and second it shows improved performance for predicting the topology of membrane proteins that contain large non-membrane domains.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1093/bioinformatics/btv709
BIOINFORMATICS
Field
DocType
Volume
Transmembrane domain,Data mining,Topology,Membrane topology,Membrane protein,General topology,Computer science,Protein superfamily,Transmembrane protein,Helix,Bioinformatics,Hydrophobicity scales
Journal
32
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
1367-4803
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christoph Peters1161.45
Konstantinos D. Tsirigos2325.72
Nanjiang Shu3524.34
Arne Elofsson463356.98