Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on April 9, 2009
Bioinformatics 2009 25(11):1433-1434; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp251
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MICAlign: a sequence-to-structure alignment tool integrating multiple sources of information in conditional random fields


Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, State Key Laboratory of Biomembrane and Membrane Biotechnology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Summary: Sequence-to-structure alignment in template-based protein structure modeling for remote homologs remains a difficult problem even following the correct recognition of folds. Here we present MICAlign, a sequence-to-structure alignment tool that incorporates multiple sources of information from local structural contexts of template, sequence profiles, predicted secondary structures, solvent accessibilities, potential-like terms (including residue–residue contacts and solvent exposures) and pre-aligned structures and sequences. These features, together with a position-specific gap scheme, were integrated into conditional random fields through which the optimal parameters were automatically learned. MICAlign showed improved alignment accuracy over several other state-of-the-art alignment tools based on comparisons by using independent datasets.
Availability: Freely available at http://www.bioinfo.tsinghua.edu.cn/
xiaxf/micalign for both web server and source code.
Contact: sunzhr{at}mail.tsinghua.edu.cn
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors.
Associate Editor: Anna Tramontano
Received on January 15, 2009; revised on April 1, 2009; accepted on April 7, 2009