Hydrophobicity Analysis of Protein Primary Structures to Identify Helical Regions

Summary

Objectives: A wavelet based approach for the hydrophobicity analysis of protein primary structures is proposed to predict the presence of alpha helices in the secondary structure.

Methods: The information about hydropathy profile periodicity content together with a score of probability of occurrence of a single amino acid allows the localization of alpha helices.

Results: The accuracy is comparable to other consolidated predictors based on different techniques (i.e.: neural networks, hidden markov models).

Conclusion: This method is particularly suitable to capture the amphiphilic character of the helical structures.

Keywords

Protein sequence - secondary structure - hydrophobicity - alpha helix - wavelet transform

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