The Sulfinator: predicting tyrosine sulfation sites in protein sequences

Protein tyrosine sulfation is an important post-translational modification of proteins that go through the secretory pathway. No clear-cut acceptor motif can be defined that allows the prediction of tyrosine sulfation sites in polypeptide chains. The Sulfinator is a software tool that can be used to predict tyrosine sulfation sites in protein sequences with an overall accuracy of 98%. Four different Hidden Markov Models were constructed, each of them specialized to recognize sulfated tyrosine residues depending on their location within the sequence: near the N-terminus, near the C-terminus, in the center of a window with a size of at least 25 amino acids, as well as in windows containing several tyrosine residues.