Question

Because threading and fold recognition detect structural homologs ________ relying on sequence similarities, they have been shown to be _______ than PSI-BLAST in finding distant evolutionary relationships

(a) without completely, far more sensitive

(b) completely, far more sensitive

(c) completely, less sensitive

(d) without completely, less sensitive

I have been asked this question in an internship interview.

The doubt is from Threading and Fold Recognition in chapter Protein Tertiary Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct option is (a) without completely, far more sensitive

Easy explanation: In many cases, they can identify more than twice as many distant homologs than PSI-BLAST. However, this high sensitivity can also be their weakness because high sensitivity is often associated with low specificity. The predictions resulting from threading and fold recognition often come with very high rates of false positives. Therefore, much caution is required in accepting the prediction results.