EMANUELSSON

Identifying localization signals in proteins

Olof Emanuelsson

Stockholm Bioinformatics Center, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

The subcellular localization of a protein is an important characteristic with implications for protein function. Various methods have been developed to predict protein localization, both based on the detection of targeting signals and on differences in overall amino acid composition between proteins from different compartments. In particular, we have developed the widely used SignalP program (for the identification of signal peptides in secretory proteins), as well as ChloroP and MitoP for chloroplast and mitochondrial targeting peptides, respectively. We are now combining these prediction methods into a global protein localization prediction scheme that should be useful for, e.g., automatic database annotation.