DeepCoil - A fast and accurate prediction of coiled-coil domains in protein sequences

Abstract

Motivation: Coiled coils are protein structural domains that mediate a plethora of biological interactions, and thus their reliable annotation is crucial for studies of protein structure and function. Results: Here, we report DeepCoil, a new neural network-based tool for the detection of coiled-coil domains in protein sequences. In our benchmarks, DeepCoil significantly outperformed current state-of-the-art tools, such as PCOILS and Marcoil, both in the prediction of canonical and non-canonical coiled coils. Furthermore, in a scan of the human genome with DeepCoil, we detected many coiled-coil domains that remained undetected by other methods. This higher sensitivity of DeepCoil should make it a method of choice for accurate genome-wide detection of coiled-coil domains.