A fast accessible surface area (ASA) predictor is presented. In this new approach no residue mutation profiles generated by multiple sequence alignments are used as inputs. Instead, we use only single sequence information and global features such as single-residue and two-residue compositions of the chain. The resulting predictor is both highly more efficient than sequence alignment based predictors and of comparable accuracy to them. Introduction of the global inputs significantly helps achieve this comparable accuracy. The predictor, termed ASAquick, is found to perform similarly well for so-called easy and hard cases indicating generalizability and possible usability for de-novo protein structure prediction. The source code and a Linux executables for ASAquick are available from Research and Information Systems at http://mamiris.com and from the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine at http://mathmed.org .
Keywords: Accessible surface area; Protein structure; Sequence only prediction.