Step 1. Open the web-server by clicking the link at http://bioinformatics.hitsz.edu.cn/iDNA-Prot_dis/ and you will see the web-server. Click on the Read Me button to see a brief introduction about the server.
Step 2. Check the open circle right in front of cp(20) or other amino acid profiles to choose which of the amino acid profile you are to use for prediction.
Step 3. Either type or copy and paste the query protein sequence into the input box, or you can also upload your input data by the Browse button. The input sequence should be in the FASTA format. A sequence in FASTA format consists of a single initial line beginning with the symbol, > , in the first column, followed by lines of sequence data in which nucleotides or amino acids are represented using single-letter codes. Except for the mandatory symbol >, all the other characters in the single initial line are optional and only used for the purpose of identification and description. The sequence ends if another line starting with the symbol > appears; this indicates the start of another sequence. Example sequences in FASTA format can be seen by clicking on the Example button right above the input box.
Step 4. Click on the Submit button to see the predicted result. For example, if you use the four query protein sequences in the Example window as the input and select profile "cp(14)" for prediction, after clicking the Submit button, you will see on your screen that the predicted results for the 1st and 2nd proteins are "DNA-binding Protein", and the other two proteins are "Non DNA-binding Protein". These four proteins were all correctly predicted. However, if you select profile "cp(20)" for prediction, the 2nd and 4th proteins cannot be correctly identified, indicating that the reduced alphabet approach improves the predictive performance of iDNA-Prot|dis.