Prediction of beta-turn in protein using E-SSpred and support vector machine

Beta-turn is a secondary protein structure type that plays an important role in protein configuration and function. Here, we introduced an approach of beta-turn prediction that used the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm combined with predicted secondary structure information. The secondary structure information was obtained by using E-SSpred, a new secondary protein structure prediction method. A 7-fold cross validation based on the benchmark dataset of 426 non-homologous protein chains was used to evaluate the performance of our method. The prediction results broke the 80% Q (total) barrier and achieved Q (total) = 80.9%, MCC = 0.44, and Q (predicted) higher 0.9% when compared with the best method. The results in our research are coincident with the conclusion that beta-turn prediction accuracy can be improved by inclusion of secondary structure information.