Yukihiro Eguchi[1]
Yasuhiko Seto[2]
[1]Research Institute, Mitsui Knowledge Industry, Co.,Ltd.
[2]Protein Research Foundation
The main subject of structural-functional studies of peptides is to search functional sites from their structural information. A very simple and powerful method for prediction of the active sites in peptide hormones from their amino acids sequences is presented. The premise for the prediction method is that the most dissimilar oligomer to all the other oligomers in a peptide is most likely to take part in forming the active site. By testing on 16 peptide hormones, it is shown that 94% of their active sites can be correctly predicted without taking into account the three-dimensional structures. When the method was applied to 11 prepro-peptides of the same hormones, the correctness is 82%.