DEPICTER: intrinsic disorder and disorder function prediction server

Abstract Computational predictions of the intrinsic disorder and its functions are instrumental to facilitate annotation for the millions of unannotated proteins. However, access to these predictors is fragmented and requires substantial effort to find them and to collect and combine their results. The DEPICTER (DisorderEd PredictIon CenTER) server provides first-of-its-kind centralized access to ten popular disorder and disorder function predictions that cover protein and nucleic acids binding, linkers and moonlighting regions. It automates the prediction process, runs user-selected methods on the server side, visualizes the results, and outputs all predictions in a consistent and easy to parse format. DEPICTER also includes two accurate consensus predictors of disorder and disordered protein-binding. Empirical tests on an independent (low similarity) benchmark dataset reveal that the computational tools included in DEPICTER generate accurate predictions that are significantly better than the results secured using sequence alignment. The DEPICTER server is freely available at http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/DEPICTER/ .