Sequence-based predictor of ATP-binding residues using random forest and mRMR-IFS feature selection

A Survey for Predicting ATP Binding Residues of Proteins Using Machine Learning Methods

Protein-ligand interactions are necessary for majority protein functions. Adenosine-5'-triphosphate (ATP) is one such ligand that plays vital role as a coenzyme in providing energy for cellular activities, catalyzing biological reaction and signaling. Knowing ATP binding residues of proteins is helpful for annotation of protein function and drug design. However, due to the huge amounts of protein sequences influx into databases in the post-genome era, experimentally identifying ATP binding residues is cost-ineffective and time-consuming. To address this problem, computational methods have been developed to predict ATP binding residues. In this review, we briefly summarized the application of machine learning methods in detecting ATP binding residues of proteins. We expect this review will be helpful for further research.

CPPred: coding potential prediction based on the global description of RNA sequence

The rapid and accurate approach to distinguish between coding RNAs and ncRNAs has been playing a critical role in analyzing thousands of novel transcripts, which have been generated in recent years by next-generation sequencing technology. Previously developed methods CPAT, CPC2 and PLEK can distinguish coding RNAs and ncRNAs very well, but poorly distinguish between small coding RNAs and small ncRNAs. Herein, we report an approach, CPPred (coding potential prediction), which is based on SVM classifier and multiple sequence features including novel RNA features encoded by the global description. The CPPred can better distinguish not only between coding RNAs and ncRNAs, but also between small coding RNAs and small ncRNAs than the state-of-the-art methods due to the addition of the novel RNA features. A recent study proposes 1335 novel human coding RNAs from a large number of RNA-seq datasets. However, only 119 transcripts are predicted as coding RNAs by the CPPred. In fact, almost all proposed novel coding RNAs are ncRNAs (91.1%), which is consistent with previous reports. Remarkably, we also reveal that the global description of encoding features (T2, C0 and GC) plays an important role in the prediction of coding potential.

Prediction of interface residue based on the features of residue interaction network

Protein-protein interaction plays a crucial role in the cellular biological processes. Interface prediction can improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of the related processes and functions. In this work, we propose a classification method to recognize the interface residue based on the features of a weighted residue interaction network. The random forest algorithm is used for the prediction and 16 network parameters and the B-factor are acting as the element of the input feature vector. Compared with other similar work, the method is feasible and effective. The relative importance of these features also be analyzed to identify the key feature for the prediction. Some biological meaning of the important feature is explained. The results of this work can be used for the related work about the structure-function relationship analysis via a residue interaction network model.

DNABP: Identification of DNA-Binding Proteins Based on Feature Selection Using a Random Forest and Predicting Binding Residues

DNA-binding proteins are fundamentally important in cellular processes. Several computational-based methods have been developed to improve the prediction of DNA-binding proteins in previous years. However, insufficient work has been done on the prediction of DNA-binding proteins from protein sequence information. In this paper, a novel predictor, DNABP (DNA-binding proteins), was designed to predict DNA-binding proteins using the random forest (RF) classifier with a hybrid feature. The hybrid feature contains two types of novel sequence features, which reflect information about the conservation of physicochemical properties of the amino acids, and the binding propensity of DNA-binding residues and non-binding propensities of non-binding residues. The comparisons with each feature demonstrated that these two novel features contributed most to the improvement in predictive ability. Furthermore, to improve the prediction performance of the DNABP model, feature selection using the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) method combined with incremental feature selection (IFS) was carried out during the model construction. The results showed that the DNABP model could achieve 86.90% accuracy, 83.76% sensitivity, 90.03% specificity and a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.727. High prediction accuracy and performance comparisons with previous research suggested that DNABP could be a useful approach to identify DNA-binding proteins from sequence information. The DNABP web server system is freely available at http://www.cbi.seu.edu.cn/DNABP/.

Protein ligand-specific binding residue predictions by an ensemble classifier

BACKGROUND

Prediction of ligand binding sites is important to elucidate protein functions and is helpful for drug design. Although much progress has been made, many challenges still need to be addressed. Prediction methods need to be carefully developed to account for chemical and structural differences between ligands.

RESULTS

In this study, we present ligand-specific methods to predict the binding sites of protein-ligand interactions. First, a sequence-based method is proposed that only extracts features from protein sequence information, including evolutionary conservation scores and predicted structure properties. An improved AdaBoost algorithm is applied to address the serious imbalance problem between the binding and non-binding residues. Then, a combined method is proposed that combines the current template-free method and four other well-established template-based methods. The above two methods predict the ligand binding sites along the sequences using a ligand-specific strategy that contains metal ions, acid radical ions, nucleotides and ferroheme. Testing on a well-established dataset showed that the proposed sequence-based method outperformed the profile-based method by 4-19% in terms of the Matthews correlation coefficient on different ligands. The combined method outperformed each of the individual methods, with an improvement in the average Matthews correlation coefficients of 5.55% over all ligands. The results also show that the ligand-specific methods significantly outperform the general-purpose methods, which confirms the necessity of developing elaborate ligand-specific methods for ligand binding site prediction.

CONCLUSIONS

Two efficient ligand-specific binding site predictors are presented. The standalone package is freely available for academic usage at http://dase.ecnu.edu.cn/qwdong/TargetCom/TargetCom_standalone.tar.gz  or request upon the corresponding author.

Sequence-Based Prediction of RNA-Binding Proteins Using Random Forest with Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance Feature Selection

The prediction of RNA-binding proteins is one of the most challenging problems in computation biology. Although some studies have investigated this problem, the accuracy of prediction is still not sufficient. In this study, a highly accurate method was developed to predict RNA-binding proteins from amino acid sequences using random forests with the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) method, followed by incremental feature selection (IFS). We incorporated features of conjoint triad features and three novel features: binding propensity (BP), nonbinding propensity (NBP), and evolutionary information combined with physicochemical properties (EIPP). The results showed that these novel features have important roles in improving the performance of the predictor. Using the mRMR-IFS method, our predictor achieved the best performance (86.62% accuracy and 0.737 Matthews correlation coefficient). High prediction accuracy and successful prediction performance suggested that our method can be a useful approach to identify RNA-binding proteins from sequence information.