Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on November 30, 2006
Bioinformatics 2007 23(3):385-386; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl610
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
K-Fold: a tool for the prediction of the protein folding kinetic order and rate

Biocomputing Group, CIRB/Department of Biology, University of Bologna via Irnerio 42, 40126 Bologna, Italy
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
|---|
Summary: K-Fold is a tool for the automatic prediction of the protein folding kinetic order and rate. The tool is based on a support vector machine (SVM) that was trained on a data set of 63 proteins, whose 3D structure and folding mechanism are known from experiments already described in the literature. The method predicts whether a protein of known atomic structure folds according to a two-state or a multi-state kinetics and correctly classifies 81% of the folding mechanisms when tested over the training set of the 63 proteins. It also predicts as a further option the logarithm of the folding rate. To the best of our knowledge, the tool discriminates for the first time whether a protein is characterized by a two state or a multiple state kinetics, during the folding process, and concomitantly estimates also the value of the constant rate of the process. When used to predict the logarithm of the folding rate, K-Fold scores with a correlation value to the experimental data of 0.74 (with a SE of 1.2).
Availability: http://gpcr.biocomp.unibo.it/cgi/predictors/K-Fold/K-Fold.cgi
Contact: emidio{at}biocomp.unibo.it
Supplementary information: http://gpcr.biocomp.unibo.it/~emidio/K-Fold/K-Fold_help.html
Present address: Structural Genomics Unit, Department of Bioinformatic (CIPF), Autopista del Saler 16, 46013 Valencia, Spain.
Associate Editor: Anna Tramontano
Received on September 22, 2006; revised on November 15, 2006; accepted on November 24, 2006