HECTAR
HECTAR is the first published prediction method to detect N-terminal target peptides for heterokonts. Three main features characterise HECTAR:
The first is the hierarchical architecture of our method which enables the identification of the complex chloroplast bi-peptide address signal.
A second feature is the modularity of our method. Each of the three HECTAR modules is dedicated to identify one specific N-terminal target peptide. It is possible to analyse only a protein sequence with a specific module or a combination of modules. In this way, a larger variety of eukaryotic organisms can be analysed, as it is the case with the variants HECTARsec and HECTARmetfun.
The third feature which outlines our method is the use of metaclassifiers for the prediction process. In each HECTAR module, significant outputs of dedicated N-terminal target prediction methods are combined by a support vector machine. It has been shown that this kind of approach improves the quality of the prediction.