Prediction of protein secondary structure based on continuous wavelet transform

In this paper, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is used to extract the number and the relevant positions of the α-helices and short peptides connecting α-helices and β-strands (connecting peptides) from the amino acid sequences of proteins. The amino acid sequence is first mapped into hydrophobicity sequence, and then transformed into CWT value of sequence domain in appropriate scale via CWT. The number and the relevant positions of the α-helices and connecting peptides can be extracted easily and accurately according to the minima of wavelet coefficient in corresponding CWT plot of hydrophobic value sequences with appropriate scale. The analytical results demonstrate that α-helices and connecting peptides can be predicted conveniently and rapidly when this method is used in the processing of 100 non-homologous sequences. However, this method is not suitable for predicting the length of α-helices and connecting peptides.