Prediction of Hydrophobic Cores of Proteins Using Wavelet Analysis

Information concerning the secondary structures, flexibility, epitope and hydrophobic regions of amino acid sequences can be extracted by assigning physicochemical indices to each amino acid residue, and information on structure can be derived using the sliding window averaging technique, which is in wide use for smoothing out raw functions. Wavelet analysis has shown great potential and applicability in many fields, such as astronomy, radar, earthquake prediction, and signal or image processing. This approach is efficient for removing noise from various functions. Here we employed wavelet analysis to smooth out a plot assigned to a hydrophobicity index for amino acid sequences. We then used the resulting function to predict hydrophobic cores in globular proteins. We calculated the prediction accuracy for the hydrophobic cores of 88 representative set of proteins. Use of wavelet analysis made feasible the prediction of hydrophobic cores at 6.13% greater accuracy than the sliding window averaging technique.