SSBI Project 2019

Tool to identify transmembrane helices in tertiary structures

Transmembrane proteins play a vital role in living cells by allowing communication and transport between the cell and the outside environment. Due to their role in a vast number of physiological processes, membrane proteins are the most popular class of drug targets. Therefore distinguishing whether a protein is transmembrane or not is an important scientific question. At large, the primary, secondary and tertiary structure of transmembrane proteins show certain differences to those of soluble, globular proteins. Due to the lipid bilayer transmembrane domains are embedded in, these segments typically consist of apolar residues, have stable secondary structures across the membrane, which in the case of helical transmembrane segments, are oriented perpendicular to the membrane plane. The implemented tool is a classifier which, given a PDB structure, is able to determine whether it is of an alpha-helical transmembrane protein, and if so, identify the approximate membrane plane and the transmembrane helices.