doi:10.1093/nar/gki408

The Robetta server

The problem of aligning, or establishing a correspondence between, residues of two protein Abbreviations used: ROC, receiver operating

alignments

Motivation: Recognizing proteins that have similar tertiary structure is the key step of template-based protein structure prediction methods. Traditionally, a variety of alignment methods are used to identify similar folds, based on sequence similarity and sequencestructure compatibility. Although these methods are complementary, their integration has not been thoroughly exploited. Statistical machine learning methods provide tools for integrating multiple features, but so far these methods have been used primarily for protein and fold classification, rather than addressing the retrieval problem of fold recognition–finding a proper template for a given query protein. Results: Here we present a two-stage machine learning, information retrieval, approach to fold recognition. First, we use alignment methods to derive pairwise similarity features for query-template protein pairs. We also use global profile-profile alignments in combination with predicted secondary structure, relative solvent accessibility, contact map, and beta-strand pairing to extract pairwise structural compatibility features. Second, we apply support vector machines to these features to predict the structural relevance (i.e. in the same fold or not) of the query-template pairs. For each query, the continuous relevance scores are used to rank the templates. The FOLDpro approach is modular, scalable, and effective. Compared to 11 other fold recognition methods, FOLDpro yields the best results in almost all standard categories on a comprehensive benchmark dataset. Using predictions of the top-ranked template, the sensitivity is about 85%, 56%, and 27 % at the family, superfamily, and fold levels respectively. Using the 5 top-ranked templates, the sensitivity increases to 90%, 70%, and 48%. Availability: The FOLDpro server is available with the SCRATCH

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Meta-BASIC

sequence profiles

We describe new algorithms and modules for protein structure prediction available as part of the PROTINFO web server. The modules, comparative and de novo modelling, have significantly improved back-end algorithms that were rigorously evaluated at the sixth meeting on the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction methods. We were one of four server groups invited to make an oral presen-tation (only the best performing groups are asked to do so). These two modules allow a user to submit a protein sequence and return atomic coordinates representing the tertiary structure of that protein. The PROTINFO server is available at