Compactness has been used to locate discontinuous structural units containing one or more polypeptide chains in proteins of known structure. Rather than exhaustively calculating the compactness of all possible units, our procedure uses a screening algorithm to find discontinuous regions that are potentially compact. Precise calculations of compactness are restricted only to units in these regions. With our procedure, compactness can be used to discover discontinuous domains with virtually any number of disjoint peptides. Small, single-domain proteins may contain several compact regionsthus, compact regions do not always correspond to folding domains.

Because a domain is an independent folding unit and should contain a hydrophobic core, compact units were further examined for the presence of hydrophobic clusters (Zehfus MH, 1995, Protein Sci 41188-1202). This added constraint limits the number of acceptable units and helps greatly in the location of the true structural domains. The larger hydrophobically stabilized compact units correspond to domains, while the smaller units may correspond to folding intermediates.