Advantages of combined transmembrane topology and signal peptide prediction—the Phobius web server

When using conventional transmembrane topology and signal peptide predictors, such as TMHMM and SignalP, there is a substantial overlap between these two types of predictions. Applying these methods to five complete proteomes, we found that 30–65% of all predicted signal peptides and 25–35% of all predicted transmembrane topologies overlap. This impairs predictions of 5–10% of the proteome, hence this is an important issue in protein annotation. To address this problem, we previously designed a hidden Markov model, Phobius, that combines transmembrane topology and signal peptide predictions. The method makes an optimal choice between transmembrane segments and signal peptides, and also allows constrained and homology-enriched predictions. We here present a web interface (http://phobius.cgb.ki.se and http://phobius.binf.ku.dk) to access Phobius.