Prediction of natively disordered regions in proteins using a bio-basis function neural network

Recent studies have found that many proteins contain regions that do not form well defined three-dimensional structures in their native states. The study and detection of such disordered regions is very important both for facilitating structural analysis and to aid understanding of protein function. A newly developed pattern recognition algorithm termed a "Bio-basis Function Neural Network" has been applied to the detection of disordered regions in proteins. Different models were trained studying the effect of changing the size of the window used for residue classification. Ten-fold cross validation showed that the estimated prediction accuracy was 95.2% for a window size of 21 residues and an overlap threshold of 30%. Blind tests using the trained models on a data set unrelated to the training set gave a regional prediction accuracy of 81.4% (+/-0.9%).