Question

Which of the following is untrue about threading and fold recognition?

(a) It assess the compatibility of an amino acid sequence with a known structure in a fold library

(b) If the protein fold to be predicted does not exist in the fold library, the method won’t necessarily fail

(c) If the protein fold to be predicted does not exist in the fold library, the method will fail

(d) Threading and fold recognition do not generate fully refined atomic models for the query sequences

This question was posed to me during an online exam.

This key question is from Threading and Fold Recognition topic in chapter Protein Tertiary Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct answer is (b) If the protein fold to be predicted does not exist in the fold library, the method won’t necessarily fail

To explain: A disadvantage compared to homology modeling lies in the fact that threading and fold recognition do not generate fully refined atomic models for the query sequences. This is because accurate alignment between distant homologs is difficult to achieve. Instead, threading and fold recognition procedures only provide a rough approximation of the overall topology of the native structure.