Inductive protein structure analysis (IPSA)

The current state of protein structure analysis and prediction methods shows three important points. First, classical methods of secondary structure prediction cannot solve the protein folding problem; secondly, a combination of classical method returns better results for the prediction of secondary structures than any one of the methods on its own; and thirdly, methods that try to incorporate the effects of long-range interactions produce a better set of results than comparable methods not using this information. This is the starting point and motivation for a new method of computer-assisted protein structure analysis. The name `Inductive Protein Structure Analysis (IPSA)' indicates the crux of the method, which is the automated search for patterns and structural regularities at different levels of the structure of proteins. The concept of `induction' generally describes the process by which a rule is derived from a set of examples