Structural class tendency of polypeptide: A new conception in predicting protein structural class

Prediction of protein domain structural classes is an important topic in protein science. In this paper, we proposed a new conception: structural class tendency of polypeptides (SCTP), which is based on the fact that a given amino acid fragment tends to be presented in certain type of proteins. The SCTP is obtained from an available training data set PDB40-B. When using the SCTP to predict protein structural classes by Intimate Sorting predictive method, we got the predictive accuracy (jackknife test) with 93.7%, 96.5%, and 78.6% for the testing data set PDB40-j, Chou&Maggiora and CHOU. These results indicate that the SCTP approach is quite encouraging and promising. This new conception provides an effective tool to extract valuable information from protein sequences.