PS-Coils: A new method for coiled-coil prediction that expolits both single sequence and evolutionary information

The coiled-coil is a widespread protein structural motif known to have a stabilization function and to be involved in key interactions in cells and organisms. Here we introduce a new program (PS-COILS) to address the problem of coiled-coil prediction. Furthermore, we select a new structurally-annotated and freely-available dataset of coiled-coil structures. We also show that PS-COILS performs better than the other available methods on the new dataset and we propose a new scoring schema that accounts for per-residue, per-segment and per-protein accuracy. The dataset and the PS-COILS code (under GPL-license) are available at www.biocomp.unibo.it/ lisa/CC. PS-COILS is also available at www.plone4bio.org through subversion interface.