Rapid membrane protein topology prediction

Summary: State-of-the-art methods for topology of α-helical membrane proteins are based on the use of time-consuming multiple sequence alignments obtained from PSI-BLAST or other sources. Here, we examine if it is possible to use the consensus of topology prediction methods that are based on single sequences to obtain a similar accuracy as the more accurate multiple sequence-based methods. Here, we show that TOPCONS-single performs better than any of the other topology prediction methods tested here, but ∼6% worse than the best method that is utilizing multiple sequence alignments. Availability and Implementation: TOPCONS-single is available as a web server from http://single.topcons.net/ and is also included for local installation from the web site. In addition, consensus-based topology predictions for the entire international protein index (IPI) is available from the web server and will be updated at regular intervals. Contact: arne@bioinfo.se Supplementary information: Supplementary data are avaliable at Bioinformatics online.