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A protein is generally classified into one of the following four structural classes: all α, all β, α+β and α/β. In this paper, based on the weighting to the 20 constituent amino acids, a new method is proposed for predicting the structural class of a protein according to its amino acid composition. The 20 weighting parameters, which reflect the different properties of the 20 constituent amino acids, have been obtained from a training set of proteins through the linear-programming approach. The rate of correct prediction for a training set of proteins by means of the new method was 100%, whereas the highest rate of previous methods was 82.8 %. Furthermore, the results showed that the more numerous training proteins, the more effective the new method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]