THE HYDROPHOBIC MOMENT PLOT AND ITS EFFICACY IN THE PREDICTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF MEMBRANE INTERACTIVE PROTEINS AND PEPTIDES

The central premise of hydrophobic moment plot methodology is that pri mary sequence information alone may be used to differentiate between a mphiphilic structures which are likely to belong to either surface act ive or globular proteins. However, the boundaries delineating the regi ons of the plot appear to be based on information derived from a relat ively small protein data set and are not well defined. This, coupled w ith the uncertainties associated with interpretation of the significan ce of the hydrophobic moment has led the reliability of this methodolo gy to be questioned with respect to predicting membrane interactions. Accordingly, we have used hydrophobic plot methodology to predict the cellular locations of an expanded set of proteins with known membrane location, including those of the original study. The accuracy of predi ction was subjected to chi-square statistical analysis and here we dis cuss the conclusion that the predictive abilities of this methodology are no better than chance.