Predicting contact map using radial basis function neural network with conformational energy function.

Contact map, which is important to understand and reconstruct protein's three-dimensional (3D) structure, may be helpful to solve the protein's 3D structure. This paper presents a novel approach to predict the contact map using Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) optimised by Conformational Energy Function (CEF) based on chemico-physical knowledge of amino acids. Finally, the results are trimmed by Short-Range Contact Function (SRCF). Consequently, it can be found that our proposed method is better than the existing methods such as PROFcon and the PE-based method. Particularly, this method can accurately predict 35% of contacts at a distance cutoff of 8 A.