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Deeper Profiles and Cascaded Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Networks for state-of-the-art Protein Secondary Structure Prediction

12 Oct 2019Scientific Reports 2019 10archive 2025-07-28

Mirko Torrisi, Manaz Kaleel, Gianluca Pollastri

Protein Secondary Structure prediction has been a central topic of research in Bioinformatics for decades. In spite of this, even the most sophisticated ab initio SS predictors are not able to reach the theoretical limit of three-state prediction accuracy (88–90%), while only a few predict more than the 3 traditional Helix, Strand and Coil classes. In this study we present tests on different models trained both on single sequence and evolutionary profile-based inputs and develop a new state-of-the-art system with Porter 5. Porter 5 is composed of ensembles of cascaded Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks, incorporates new input encoding techniques and is trained on a large set of protein structures. Porter 5 achieves 84% accuracy (81% SOV) when tested on 3 classes and 73% accuracy (70% SOV) on 8 classes on a large independent set. In our tests Porter 5 is 2% more accurate than its previous version and outperforms or matches the most recent predictors of secondary structure we tested. When Porter 5 is retrained on SCOPe based sets that eliminate homology between training/testing samples we obtain similar results. Porter is available as a web server and standalone program at http://distilldeep.ucd.ie/porter/ alongside all the datasets and alignments.

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Protein Secondary Structure Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Protein Secondary Structure Prediction 2017_test set Porter5 Q3 84.19 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Protein Secondary Structure Prediction 2017_test set Porter5 Q8 73.02 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Protein Secondary Structure Prediction 2019_test set Porter5 Q3 81.74 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Protein Secondary Structure Prediction CB513 Porter5 Q8 0.74 #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Jpred4 blind set Porter5 Accuracy 84.62 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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