Protein contact order prediction from primary sequences

BACKGROUND: Contact order is a topological descriptor that has been shown to be correlated with several interesting protein properties such as protein folding rates and protein transition state placements. Contact order has also been used to select for viable protein folds from ab initio protein structure prediction programs. For proteins of known three-dimensional structure, their contact order can be calculated directly. However, for proteins with unknown three-dimensional structure, there is no effective prediction method currently available. RESULTS: In this paper, we propose several simple yet very effective methods to predict contact order from the amino acid sequence only. One set of methods is based on a weighted linear combination of predicted secondary structure content and amino acid composition. Depending on the number of components used in these equations it is possible to achieve a correlation coefficient of 0.857–0.870 between the observed and predicted contact order. A second method, based on sequence similarity to known three-dimensional structures, is able to achieve a correlation coefficient of 0.977. We have also developed a much more robust implementation for calculating contact order directly from PDB coordinates that works for > 99% PDB files. All of these contact order predictors and calculators have been implemented as a web server (see Availability and requirements section for URL). CONCLUSION: Protein contact order can be effectively predicted from the primary sequence, at the absence of three-dimensional structure. Three factors, percentage of residues in alpha helices, percentage of residues in beta strands, and sequence length, appear to be strongly correlated with the absolute contact order.