Protein Tertiary Structure Prediction Method based on Fragment Assembly

A novel method for ab initio prediction of protein tertiary structures, PROFESY (PROFile Enumerating SYstem), is introduced. This method utilizes secondary structure prediction information and fragment assembly. The secondary structure prediction of proteins is performed with the PREDICT method which uses PSI-BLAST to generate profiles and a distance measure in the pattern space. In order to predict the tertiary structure of a protein sequence, we assemble fragments in the fragment library constructed as a byproduct of PREDICT. The tertiary structure is obtained by minimizing the potential energy using the conformational space annealing method which enables one to sample diverse low lying minima of the energy function. We apply PROFESY for prediction of some proteins with known structures, which shows good performances. We also participated in CASP5 and applied PROFESY to new fold targets for blind predictions. The results were quite promising, despite the fact that PROFESY was in its early stage of development. In particular, the PROFESY result is the best for the hardest target T0161.