Motivation: The translocon recognizes sufficiently hydrophobic regions of a protein and inserts them into the membrane. Computational methods try to determine what hydrophobic regions are recognized by the translocon. Although these predictions are quite accurate, many methods still fail to distinguish marginally hydrophobic transmembrane (TM) helices and equally hydrophobic regions in soluble protein domains. In vivo, this problem is most likely avoided by targeting of the TM-proteins, so that non-TM proteins never see the translocon. Proteins are targeted to the translocon by an N-terminal signal peptide. The targeting is also aided by the fact that the N-terminal helix is more hydrophobic than other TM-helices. In addition, we also recently found that the C-terminal helix is more hydrophobic than central helices. This information has not been used in earlier topology predictors.
展开▼
