题目：Finding discontinuous domain from protein sequence

摘要：Protein domains are subunits that can fold and evolve independently. The majority of eukaryotic proteins are found to consist of multiple domains for achieving various composite cellular functions (1). The identification of protein domains is thus the essential step for protein structure determination and functional annotations, where a variety of computational methods have been proposed to divide proteins into domains from the amino acid sequences (2). Most of the methods can only generate predictions for continuous domains (CDs) that consist of continuous residues along the query sequence, while a large number of proteins contain discontinuous domains (DCDs). For example, the current PDB library deposits about 18% proteins with at least one DCD which consists of two or more non-sequential segmental sequences (3). The detection and correct division of the DCDs represents a major challenging problem. Here, we propose a new domain prediction server, ThreaDomEx, which combines the ThreaDom and DomEx methods into a unified and user-friendly on-line server system for efficient structural domain predictions. Compared with many of the existing servers, one of the major novelties of ThreaDomEx is the enhanced ability to predict the DCD structures, mainly through the incorporation of the DomEx algorithm that assembles non-consecutive domain segments following multiple threading template alignments.

报告人： 薛志东，华中科技大学软件学院教授