A consensus procedure for predicting the location of alpha-helical transmembrane segments in proteins

To aid in the development of three-dimensional models of membrane-bound proteins, a consensus procedure for predicting alpha-helical transmembrane segments from amino acid sequence is presented. The algorithm combines the results of six individual prediction methods and some basic properties of membrane-spanning helices to obtain a final consensus prediction. Comparison with experiment and several other recently developed methods shows that the consensus procedure performs quite well in comparison to other recent methods. A FORTRAN program has been developed which takes an input file containing an amino acid sequence in one-letter code and outputs a list of the alpha-helical transmembrane segments predicted by the consensus algorithm.