Optimized fold RecognitION

ORION is a new profile-profile fold recognition approach that relies on a better description of the local protein structure to boost distantly protein detection. These descriptors called Protein Blocks (PB) encodes a structural alphabet defined by 16 folding patterns that describe accurately local protein structures (de Brevern et al. 2000) contrary to the secondary structures which are composed of only 3 predicted states (helix , strand and coil). Sequence profile and predicted PB profile of target are combined to search by a profile-profile dynamic programming algorithm in a library of templates profiles build from structural alignments.