Amino acid torsion angles enable prediction of protein fold classification.

ABSTRACT

Protein structure can provide insights that help biologists to predict and understand protein functions and interactions. However, the number of known protein structures has not kept pace with the number of protein sequences determined by high-throughput sequencing. Current techniques used to determine the structure of proteins are complex and require a lot of time to analyze the experimental results, especially for large protein molecules. The limitations of these methods have motivated us to create a new approach for protein structure prediction. Here we describe a new approach to predict of protein structures and structure classes from amino acid sequences. Our prediction model performs well in comparison with previous methods when applied to the structural classification of two CATH datasets with more than 5000 protein domains. The average accuracy is 92.5% for structure classification, which is higher than that of previous research. We also used our model to predict four known protein structures with a single amino acid sequence, while many other existing methods could only obtain one possible structure for a given sequence. The results show that our method provides a new effective and reliable tool for protein structure prediction research.