QuatIdent: a web server for identifying protein quaternary structural attribute by fusing functional domain and sequential evolution information.

Many proteins exist in vivo as oligomers with various different quaternary structural attributes rather than as single individual chains. They are the structural bases of various marvelous biological functions such as cooperative effects, allosteric mechanism, and ion-channel gating. Therefore, with the avalanche of protein sequences generated in the postgenomic era, it is very important for both basic research and drug discovery to identify their quaternary structural attributes in a timely manner. In view of this, a powerful ensemble identifier, called QuatIdent, is developed by fusing the functional domain and sequential evolution information. QuatIdent is a 2-layer predictor. The 1st layer is for identifying a query protein as belonging to which one of the following 10 main quaternary structural attributes: (1) monomer, (2) dimer, (3) trimer, (4) tetramer, (5) pentamer, (6) hexamer, (7) heptamer, (8) octamer, (9) decamer, and (10) dodecamer. If the result thus obtained turns out to be anything but monomer, the process will be automatically continued to further identify it as belonging to a homo-oligomer or hetero-oligomer. The overall success rate by QuatIdent for the 1st layer identification was 71.1% and that for the 2nd layer ranged from 84 to 96%. These rates were derived by the jackknife cross-validation tests on the stringent benchmark data sets where none of proteins has > or =60% pairwise sequence identity to any other in a same subset. QuatIdent is freely accessible to the public as a web server via the site at http://www.csbio.sjtu.edu.cn/bioinf/Quaternary/ , by which one can get the desired 2-level results for a query protein sequence in around 25 seconds. The longer the sequence is, the more time that is needed.