Jakub Paś

We have developed a fully automated web service available for the academic community which purpose is to increase the sensitivity of the detection of distantly related protein families. Predicted secondary structure information was added to the information about sequence conservation and variability, a technique known from hybrid threading approaches. The accuracy of the meta profiles created this way is compared with profiles containing only sequence information and with the standard approach of aligning a single sequence with a profile. Additionally, the alignment of meta profiles is more sensitive in detecting remote homology between protein families and more effective than aligning two sequence-only profiles or profile to sequence. The specificity of the alignment score is improved in it’s lower range compared to the robust sequence-only profiles. ( More ) Comprehensive classification of nucleotidyltransferase fold proteins: identification of novel families and their representatives in