Two versions of SScon are available: SScon5 that includes homology modeling-based secondary structure (SS) predictors and SScon3 that consider only ab initio methods. When using SScon5, the user is requested to obtain predictions from the five input SS predictors including SSpro (4.03), PROTEUS, SPINE X, PSIPRED 2.5 and PORTER (each method is linked to its web server). Similarly, to use SScon3, the user should collect prediction from the three ab initio predictors: SPINE X, PSIPRED and PORTER.
SScon accepts either single or multiple protein sequences. The input is limited to 1000 protein sequences at the time. The user should submit the protein sequence(s) in FASTA format.
The format of the input file for SScon5 is as follows (example):
The format of the input file for SScon3 is as follows (example):
Upon the usage the users are requested to use the following citation:
Training set contains 987 proteins; they were used to design the consensus model. Test set includes 988 proteins; they were utilized to perform out-of-sample evaluation and comparison with existing standalone SS predictors. Note that training and test datasets share low (<25%) pairwise sequence similarity.
The standalone version of SSCon is available for free, for non commercial users, at this location (link).
We acknowledge, with thanks, that the following software was used as a part of this server: