Quad-PRE: a hybrid method to predict protein quaternary structure attributes

The protein quaternary structure is very important to the biological process. Predicting their attributes is an essential task in computational biology for the advancement of the proteomics. However, the existing methods did not consider sufficient properties of amino acid. To end this, we proposed a hybrid method Quad-PRE to predict protein quaternary structure attributes using the properties of amino acid, predicted secondary structure, predicted relative solvent accessibility, and position-specific scoring matrix profiles and motifs. Empirical evaluation on independent dataset shows that Quad-PRE achieved higher overall accuracy 81.7%, especially higher accuracy 92.8%, 93.3%, and 90.6% on discrimination for trimer, hexamer, and octamer, respectively. Our model also reveals that six features sets are all important to the prediction, and a hybrid method is an optimal strategy by now. The results indicate that the proposed method can classify protein quaternary structure attributes effectively.