Statistical dependence of protein secondary structure on amino acid bigrams

Abstract

The statistical dependence of protein secondary structure on amino acid bigram frequencies was studied. Proteins in the PDBSELECT subset of the Protein Data Bank database were investigated. Protein secondary structures were determined using DSSP software. The conditional probabilities of protein secondary structures were calculated and presented. The results on bigrams show the frequencies of all the possible bigrams in all secondary structure types. These results elucidate some factors important for the prediction of the secondary structures of proteins based on the amino acid sequence.