Comparing co-evolution methods and their application to template-free protein structure prediction.

Motivation: Co-evolution methods have been used as contact predictors to identify pairs of residues that share spatial proximity. Such contact predictors have been compared in terms of the precision of their predictions, but there is no study that compares their usefulness to model generation.

Results: We compared eight different co-evolution methods for a set of ∼3500 proteins and found that metaPSICOV stage 2 produces, on average, the most precise predictions.