Despite the fundamental role of experimental protein structure determination, computational methods are of essential importance to bridge the ever growing gap between available protein sequence and structure data. Common structure prediction methods rely on experimental data, which is not available for about half of the known protein families.

Recent advancements in amino acid contact prediction have revolutionized the field of protein structure prediction. Contacts can be used to guide template-free structure predictions that do not rely on experimentally solved structures of homologous proteins. Such methods are now able to produce accurate models for a wide range of protein families.

We developed PconsC2, an approach that improved existing contact prediction methods by recognizing intra-molecular contact patterns and noise reduction. An inherent problem of contact prediction based on maximum entropy models is that large alignments with over 1000 effective sequences are needed to infer contacts accurately. These are however not available for more than 80% of all protein families that do not have a representative structure in PDB. With PconsC3, we could extend the applicability of contact prediction to families as small as 100 effective sequences by combining global inference methods with machine learning based on local pairwise measures.

By introducing PconsFold, a pipeline for contact-based structure prediction, we could show that improvements in contact prediction accuracy translate to more accurate models. Finally, we applied a similar technique to Pfam, a comprehensive database of known protein families. In addition to using a faster folding protocol we employed model quality assessment methods, crucial for estimating the confidence in the accuracy of predicted models. We propose models tobe accurate for 558 families that do not have a representative known structure. Out of those, over 75% have not been reported before.