On preprocessing of protein sequences for neural network prediction of polyproline type II secondary structures

Polyproline type II stretches are somewhat rare on proteins. The backbone of this secondary structural element folds to a triangular form instead of the normal alpha-helix with 3.6 residues per turn. It is a very challenging task to try to detect them computationally from protein sequence. Here, we have studied the preprocessing phase in particular, which is important for any machine learning method. Preprocessing included selection of relevant data from the Protein Data Bank and investigation of learnability properties. These properties show whether the material is suitable for neural network computing. The complexity of algorithms in connection with preprocessing was briefly considered. We found that feedforward perceptron neural networks were appropriate for the prediction of polyproline type II and also relatively efficient in this task. The problem is very difficult because of the great similarity of the two classes present in the classification. Nevertheless, neural networks were able to recognize and predict about 75% of secondary structures.