Consensus prediction of protein conformational disorder from amino acidic sequence

Predictions of protein conformational disorder are important in structural biology since they can allow the elimination of protein constructs, the three-dimensional structure of which cannot be determined since they are natively unfolded. Here a new procedure is presented that allows one to predict with high accuracy disordered residues on the basis of protein sequences. It makes use of twelve prediction methods and merges their results by using least-squares optimization. A statistical survey of the Protein Data Bank is also reported, in order to know how many residues can be disordered in proteins that were crystallized and the three-dimensional structure of which was determined.