Proteolysis Data Bank: specificity of alpha-chymotrypsin from computation of protein cleavages.

The specificity of alpha-chymotrypsin was determined by computation of data retrieved from the Proteolysis Data Bank. The coefficients Kn enable the calculation of the relative influence of the neighbouring amino acid residues in subsites P3--P'3 on the probability of cleavage of polypeptide substrates. The extent of the fixation sites of chymotrypsin and pepsin are compared. The results of the study indicate that predictions of cleavage by proteolytic enzymes can be made from the sequence of polypeptide substrates, provided that a sufficient pool of experimental data has been collected.