COMPUTATIONAL METHOD TO PREDICT MITOCHONDRIALLY IMPORTED PROTEINS ANDTHEIR TARGETING SEQUENCES

Most of the proteins that are used in mitochondria an imported through the double membrane of the organelle. The information that guides the protein to mitochondria is contained in its sequence and structure, a lthough no direct evidence can be obtained. In this article, discrimin ant analysis has been performed with 47 parameters and a large set of mitochondrial proteins extracted from the SwissProt database. A comput ational method that facilitates the analysis and objective prediction of mitochondrially imported proteins has been developed. If only the a mino acid sequence is considered, 75-97% of the mitochondrial proteins studied have been predicted to be imported into mitochondria. Moreove r, the existence of mitochondrial-targeting sequences is predicted in 76-94% of the analyzed mitochondrial precursor proteins. As a practica l application, the number of unknown yeast open reading frames that mi ght be mitochondrial proteins has been predicted, which revealed that many of them are clustered.