Recent Advances in Computational Prediction of Secondary and Supersecondary Structures from Protein Sequences

The secondary structures (SSs) and supersecondary structures (SSSs) underlie the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Prediction of the SSs and SSSs from protein sequences enjoys high levels of use and finds numerous applications in the development of a broad range of other bioinformatics tools. Numerous sequence-based predictors of SS and SSS were developed and published in recent years. We survey and analyze 45 SS predictors that were released since 2018, focusing on their inputs, predictive models, scope of their prediction, and availability. We also review 32 sequence-based SSS predictors, which primarily focus on predicting coiled coils and beta-hairpins and which include five methods that were published since 2018. Substantial majority of these predictive tools rely on machine learning models, including a variety of deep neural network architectures. They also frequently use evolutionary sequence profiles. We discuss details of several modern SS and SSS predictors that are currently available to the users and which were published in higher impact venues.