Figure 8

Motif hits in Swiss-Prot transmembrane proteins vs. globular proteins. Distribution of the number of high-confidence motif hits in transmembrane proteins (red histogram) vs. globular proteins (blue histogram) in the Swiss-Prot database. The plot shows that almost all globular proteins do not exhibit more than 5 different motif hits per sequence, unlike transmembrane proteins, which contain more than five motif hits (and up to 100 matches). This allows to conclude that it can be possible to identify and characterize a new protein sequnce as 'transmembrane' if the number of different motifs hits from our library is higher than five.