Research on Several Prediction Methods of Membrane Protein Structure and Topology

Since present prediction methods of membrane protein structure and topology made use of mixed data sets both from experiments and prediction as training and test sets, the reliability and accuracy of their prediction is still under debate. To benchmark the performance of these methods, this commentary uses a test set of membrane proteins created by European Bioinformatics Institute with either available 3 D structure or experimentally confirmed transmembrane regions. Then the prediction results are compared and the problems existing in these methods and important features for successful prediction are pointed out, which may help users to choose a more reliable prediction from different results. Based upon recent advances in membrane protein, possible means to improve topology prediction accuracy are discussed.