Assessment of some problems associated with prediction of the three dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence

Abstract

It is shown that most present empirical prediction algorithms provide information about the conformational states of individual residues, but give little information about the three-dimensional structure of a protein. It is necessary to predict the conformational state of every residue before the resulting structure can serve as a starting conformation to compute the native structure. It is also shown that even a perfect five-state algorithm (which does not include long-range interactions from disulifide loop closing or solvation) will not lead to a globular structure resembling the native one. However, starting from the results of a perfect prediction algorithm, it appears that conformation..