AAFreqCoil: a new classifier to distinguish parallel dimeric and trimeric coiled coils

Abstract

Coiled coils are characteristic rope-like protein structures, constituted by one or more heptad repeats. Native coiled-coil structures play important roles in various biological processes, while the designed ones are widely employed in medicine and industry. To date, two major oligomeric states (i.e. dimeric and trimeric states) of a coiled-coil structure have been observed, plausibly exerting different biological functions. Therefore, exploration of the relationship between heptad repeat sequences and coiled coil structures is highly important. In this paper, we develop a new method named AAFreqCoil to classify parallel dimeric and trimeric coiled coils. Our method demonstrated its competitive performance when benchmarked based on 10-fold cross validation and jackknife cross validation. Meanwhile, the rules that can explicitly explain the prediction results of the test coiled coil can be extracted from the AAFreqCoil model for a better explanation of user predictions. A web server and stand-alone program implementing the AAFreqCoil algorithm are freely available at http://genomics.fzu.edu.cn/AAFreqCoil/.