Affiliations: Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC), National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tokyo,
Japan
Note: [] Corresponding author: Shuichi Hirose, Computational Biology
Research Center (CBRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology (AIST), 2–43 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan. Tel.: +81 3 3599
8730; Fax: +81 3 3599 8081; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: Under physiological conditions, many proteins that include a region
lacking well-defined three-dimensional structures have been identified,
especially in eukaryotes. These regions often play an important biological
cellular role, although they cannot form a stable structure. Therefore, they
are biologically remarkable phenomena. From an industrial perspective, they can
provide useful information for determining three-dimensional structures or
designing drugs. For these reasons, disordered regions have attracted a great
deal of attention in recent years. Their accurate prediction is therefore
anticipated to provide annotations that are useful for wide range of
applications. POODLE-I (where "I" stands for integration) is a web-based
disordered region prediction system. POODLE-I integrates prediction results
obtained from three kinds of disordered region predictors (POODLEs) developed
from the viewpoint that the characteristics of disordered regions change
according to their length. Furthermore, POODLE-I combines that information with
predicted structural information by application of a workflow approach. When
compared with server teams that showed best performance in CASP8, POODLE-I
ranked among the top and exhibited the highest performance in predicting
unfolded proteins. POODLE-I is an efficient tool for detecting disordered regions in
proteins solely from the amino acid sequence. The application is freely
available at http://mbs.cbrc.jp/poodle/poodle-i.html.
