A simple method for predicting the secondary structure of globular proteins: implications and accuracy

A method is presented for predicting the secondary structure of globular proteins from their amino acid sequence. It is based on a rigorous statistical exploitation of the well-known biological fact that the amino acid compositions of each secondary structure are different. We also propose an evaluation process that allows us to estimate the capacity of a method to predict the secondary structure of a new protein which does not have any homologous proteins whose structure is already known. This evaluation process shows that our method has a prediction accuracy of 58.7% over three states for the 62 proteins of the Kabsch and Sander (1983a) data bank. This result is better than that obtained by the most widely used methods--Lim (1974), Chou and Fasman (1978) and Garnier et al. (1978)--and also than that obtained by a recent method based on local homologies (Levin et al., 1986). Our prediction method is very simple and may be implemented on any microcomputer and even on programmable pocket calculators. A simple Pascal implementation of the method prediction algorithm is given. The interpretation of our results in terms of protein folding and directions for further work are discussed.