ProtRAP: Predicting Lipid Accessibility Together with Solvent Accessibility of Proteins in One Run

Solvent accessibility has been extensively used to characterize and predict the chemical properties of the surface residues of soluble proteins. However, there is not yet a widely accepted quantity of the same dimension for the study of lipid-accessible residues of membrane proteins. In this study, we propose that lipid accessibility, defined in a similar way to solvent accessibility, can be used to characterize the lipid-accessible residues of membrane proteins. Moreover, we developed a deep learning-based method, ProtRAP (Protein Relative Accessibility Predictor), to predict the relative lipid accessibility and relative solvent accessibility of residues from a given protein sequence, which can infer which residues are likely accessible to lipids, accessible to solvent, or buried in the protein interior in one run.