Protein beta-turn assignments

Abstract

A classical way to analyze protein 3D structures or models is to investigate their secondary structures. Their predictions are also widely used as a help to build new 3D models. Thus, hundreds of prediction methods have been proposed. Nonetheless before predicting, secondary structure assignment is required even if not trivial. Therefore numerous but diverging assignment methods have been developed. Beta-turns constitute the third most important secondary structures. However, no analysis to compare the beta-turn distributions according to different secondary structure assignment methods has ever been done. We propose in this paper to analyze and evaluate the results of such a comparison. We highlight some important divergence that could have important consequence for the analysis and prediction of beta-turns.