A Prediction Method for Transmembrane Segments in Proteins Utilizing Multiple Discrimination Functions

A novel method for detecting transmembrane segments in membrane proteins is presented. The method employs discriminant analysis to detect transmembrane regions in a query sequence by taking advantage of the information of different characteristics in different subgroups of membrane proteins classified according to the number of transmembrane segments. The method was applied to sequences of membrane proteins with experimentally determined locations of transmembrane segments. 1 Introduction Membrane proteins play important roles in biological systems. While there is an increasing amount of sequence data available, only a few three-dimensional structures have been solved by experimental methods. Under these conditions, there is a growing need for computational methods to give insights into the structure of membrane proteins. The starting point of the computational analysis is to predict the location of transmembrane segments in a given sequence. A number of methods have been proposed thu...