The TOPCONS web server for consensus prediction of membrane protein topology and signal peptides

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

TOPCONS (http://topcons.net/) is a widely used web server for consensus prediction of membrane protein topology. We hereby present a major update to the server, with some substantial improvements, including the following: (i) TOPCONS can now efficiently separate signal peptides from transmembrane regions. (ii) The server can now differentiate more successfully between globular and membrane proteins. (iii) The server now is even slightly faster, although a much larger database is used to generate the multiple sequence alignments. For most proteins, the final prediction is produced in a matter of seconds. (iv) The user-friendly interface is retained, with the additional feature of submitting batch files and accessing the server programmatically using standard interfaces, making it thus ideal for proteome-wide analyses. Indicatively, the user can now scan the entire human proteome in a few days. (v) For proteins with homology to a known 3D structure, the homology-inferred topology is also displayed. (vi) Finally, the combination of methods currently implemented achieves an overall increase in performance by 4% as compared to the currently available best-scoring methods and TOPCONS is the only method that can identify signal peptides and still maintain a state-of-the-art performance in topology predictions.

Original languageEnglish
JournalNucleic Acids Research
Volume43
Issue numberW1
Pages (from-to)W401-W407
ISSN0305-1048
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

    Research areas

  • Algorithms, Humans, Internet, Membrane Proteins/chemistry, Protein Conformation, Protein Sorting Signals, Software, Structural Homology, Protein

ID: 238682850