M. Cserzo et al., PREDICTION OF TRANSMEMBRANE ALPHA-HELICES IN PROKARYOTIC MEMBRANE-PROTEINS - THE DENSE ALIGNMENT SURFACE METHOD, Protein engineering, 10(6), 1997, pp. 673-676
A new, simple method for predicting transmembrane segments in integral
membrane proteins has been developed, It is based on low-stringency d
ot-plots of the query sequence against a collection of non-homologous
membrane proteins using a previously derived scoring matrix [Cserzo et
al., 1994, J. Mol. Biol., 243, 388-396], This so-called dense alignme
nt surface (DAS) method is shown to perform on par with earlier method
s that require extra information in the form of multiple sequence alig
nments or the distribution of positively charged residues outside the
transmembrane segments, and thus improves prediction abilities when on
ly single-sequence information is available or for classes of membrane
proteins that do not follow the 'positive inside' rule.