Welcome to the "Prediction of Secondary Structure by Amino acid Properties" server at the Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology of Institute of Food Science, CNR, Italy.
This service provides predictions of secondary structures starting from the amino acid sequence of a given protein. It is based on the work of Costantini et al., 2006 ( PubMed link), in which we described a new point-of-view about the secondary structure predictions developed in the 1970's by the pioneering work of Chou and Fasman. Their prediction method was based on the statistical propensity of amino acids for secondary structures, evaluated on the few tens of proteins for which X-ray determined 3D structures were available. On the basis of such propensities, for any amino acid sequence it was possible to evaluate the mean propensity of each short segment for the different secondary structures, and so to predict the secondary structure of the protein.
During the 1980's and 1990's years, new approaches were developed by using more sophisticated computational methods.
In our prediction, the principles of Chou and Fasman method have been reconsidered, but apply them with propensities evaluated for large protein data sets, as well as for smaller but homogeneous data sets (see our article for more details).
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