PROTEIN FOLD RECOGNITION BY SEQUENCE THREADING - TOOLS AND ASSESSMENTTECHNIQUES

Protein fold recognition has been approached by threading an amino aci d sequence onto a library of folds, calculating a sequence-structure c ompatibility score, and ranking these scores, Due to imperfections in the empirically derived pairwise potential functions and the necessari ly heuristic approach to the sequence-structure alignment problem, the method benefits from the assessment of threaded models to evaluate th e most probable structures among the list of possible folds, THREADER and ANALYST, software tools available through the Internet, facilitate the alignment and assessment steps of a threading prediction, No proc ess has been found to be universally reliable for the detection of fol ds related to the structure of a known input sequence, but several use ful steps and approaches are discussed.