FOLD-RATE: prediction of protein folding rates from amino acid sequence

We have developed a web server, FOLD- RATE, for predicting the folding rates of proteins from their amino acid sequences. The relationship between amino acid properties and protein folding rates has been systematically analyzed and a statistical method based on linear regression technique has been proposed for predicting the folding rate of proteins. We found that the classification of proteins into different structural classes shows an excellent correlation between amino acid properties and folding rates of two and three- state proteins. Consequently, different regression equations have been developed for proteins belonging to all-alpha, all-beta and mixed class. We observed an excellent agreement between predicted and experimentally observed folding rates of proteins; the correlation coefficients are, 0.99, 0.97 and 0.90, respectively, for all-alpha, all-beta and mixed class proteins. The prediction server is freely available at http://psfs.cbrc.jp/fold-rate/.