Prediction of number and position of domain boundaries in multi-domain proteins by use of amino acid sequence alone.

Prediction of protein domain boundaries is an important step for the prediction of three-dimensional structure. The simple method PDP has been elaborated for prediction of the number and position of domain boundaries in multi-domain proteins by use of amino acid sequence alone. The method uses an optimized scale based on the statistics of appearance of amino acid residues at domain boundaries. Our method demonstrates promising results in comparison to other methods that do not use homologous sequences. From the database of proteins that are targets from CASP6 (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) our program correctly assigned the number of domains for approximately 80% of one domain proteins and approximately 50% for two-domain proteins. Our method offers three main advantages: it is very simple, it is fast, and it uses a minimal number of parameters in comparison with other methods.