Prediction of Protein Secondary Structure Content Using Amino Acid Composition and Evolutionary Information

There have been many attempts to predict the secondary structure content of a protein from its primary sequence, which serves as the first step in a series of bioinformatics processes to gain knowledge of the structure and function of a protein. Most of them assumed that prediction relying on the information of the amino acid composition of a protein can be successful. Several approaches expanded the amount of information by including the pair amino acid composition of two adjacent residues. Recent methods achieved a remarkable improvement in prediction accuracy by using this expanded composition information. The overall average errors of two successful methods were 6.1% and 3.4%. This work was motivated by the observation that evolutionarily related proteins share the similar structure. After manipulating the values of the frequency matrix obtained by running PSI-BLAST, inputs of an artificial neural network were constructed by taking the ratio of the amino acid composition of the evolutionarily related proteins with a query protein to the background probability. Although we did not utilize the expanded composition information of amino acid pairs, we obtained the comparable accuracy, with the overall average error being 3.6%.