Accurate classification of homodimeric vs other homooligomeric proteins using a new measure of information discrepancy.

It has been shown that protein primary sequence encodes quaternary structure information. In this present work, function of degree of disagreement (FDOD), a new measure of information discrepancy, is applied to discriminating between homodimers and other homooligomeric proteins from the primary structure. This new approach is based on subsequence distributions of the primary sequences, so the effect of residue order on protein structure is taken into account. When the length of subsequence is 4, the overall accuracy of the 10-fold cross-validation test attains to 82.5%, which is much better than that of the previous method on the same data set. Our tests demonstrate that the residue order along protein sequences plays an important role in the prediction of homooligomers. In addition, our results suggest that FDOD measure is a simple and powerful tool for the prediction of protein multimeric states.