A correlation analysis of the amino acid composition and the cellular
location of a protein is presented. The statistical analysis discrimin
ates among the following five protein classes: integral membrane prote
ins, anchored membrane proteins, extracellular proteins, intracellular
proteins and nuclear proteins. This segregation into protein classes
related to their location can help researchers to design experimental
work for testing hypotheses in order to find out the functionality of
a reading frame in search of function. A program (ProtLock) to predict
the cellular location of a protein has been designed. (C) 1997 Academ
ic Press Limited.