Predicting acidic and alkaline enzymes by incorporating the average chemical shift and gene ontology informations into the general form of Chou's PseAAC

Leveraging protein language model embeddings and logistic regression for efficient and accurate in-silico acidophilic proteins classification

The increasing demand for eco-friendly technologies in biotechnology necessitates effective and sustainable catalysts. Acidophilic proteins, functioning optimally in highly acidic environments, hold immense promise for various applications, including food production, biofuels, and bioremediation. However, limited knowledge about these proteins hinders their exploration. This study addresses this gap by employing in silico methods utilizing computational tools and machine learning. We propose a novel approach to predict acidophilic proteins using protein language models (PLMs), accelerating discovery without extensive lab work. Our investigation highlights the potential of PLMs in understanding and harnessing acidophilic proteins for scientific and industrial advancements. We introduce the ACE model, which combines a simple Logistic Regression model with embeddings derived from protein sequences processed by the ProtT5 PLM. This model achieves high performance on an independent test set, with accuracy (0.91), F1-score (0.93), and Matthew's correlation coefficient (0.76). To our knowledge, this is the first application of pre-trained PLM embeddings for acidophilic protein classification. The ACE model serves as a powerful tool for exploring protein acidophilicity, paving the way for future advancements in protein design and engineering.

Approaching Optimal pH Enzyme Prediction with Large Language Models

Enzymes are widely used in biotechnology due to their ability to catalyze chemical reactions: food making, laundry, pharmaceutics, textile, brewing─all these areas benefit from utilizing various enzymes. Proton concentration (pH) is one of the key factors that define the enzyme functioning and efficiency. Usually there is only a narrow range of pH values where the enzyme is active. This is a common problem in biotechnology to design an enzyme with optimal activity in a given pH range. A large part of this task can be completed in silico, by predicting the optimal pH of designed candidates. The success of such computational methods critically depends on the available data. In this study, we developed a language-model-based approach to predict the optimal pH range from the enzyme sequence. We used different splitting strategies based on sequence similarity, protein family annotation, and enzyme classification to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. The derived machine-learning models demonstrated high accuracy across proteins from different protein families and proteins with lower sequence similarities compared with the training set. The proposed method is fast enough for the high-throughput virtual exploration of protein space for the search for sequences with desired optimal pH levels.

Predicting Cell Wall Lytic Enzymes Using Combined Features

Due to the overuse of antibiotics, people are worried that existing antibiotics will become ineffective against pathogens with the rapid rise of antibiotic-resistant strains. The use of cell wall lytic enzymes to destroy bacteria has become a viable alternative to avoid the crisis of antimicrobial resistance. In this paper, an improved method for cell wall lytic enzymes prediction was proposed and the amino acid composition (AAC), the dipeptide composition (DC), the position-specific score matrix auto-covariance (PSSM-AC), and the auto-covariance average chemical shift (acACS) were selected to predict the cell wall lytic enzymes with support vector machine (SVM). In order to overcome the imbalanced data classification problems and remove redundant or irrelevant features, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) was used to balance the dataset. The F-score was used to select features. The S_n, S_p, MCC, and Acc were 99.35%, 99.02%, 0.98, and 99.19% with jackknife test using the optimized combination feature AAC+DC+acACS+PSSM-AC. The S_n, S_p, MCC, and Acc of cell wall lytic enzymes in our predictive model were higher than those in existing methods. This improved method may be helpful for protein function prediction.

Remarks on Computational Method for Identifying Acid and Alkaline Enzymes

The catalytic efficiency of the enzyme is thousands of times higher than that of ordinary catalysts. Thus, they are widely used in industrial and medical fields. However, enzymes with protein structure can be destroyed and inactivated in high temperature, over acid or over alkali environment. It is well known that most of enzymes work well in an environment with pH of 6-8, while some special enzymes remain active only in an alkaline environment with pH > 8 or an acidic environment with pH < 6. Therefore, the identification of acidic and alkaline enzymes has become a key task for industrial production. Because of the wide varieties of enzymes, it is hard work to determine the acidity and alkalinity of the enzyme by experimental methods, and even this task cannot be achieved. Converting protein sequences into digital features and building computational models can efficiently and accurately identify the acidity and alkalinity of enzymes. This review summarized the progress of the digital features to express proteins and computational methods to identify acidic and alkaline enzymes. We hope that this paper will provide more convenience, ideas, and guides for computationally classifying acid and alkaline enzymes.

Some illuminating remarks on molecular genetics and genomics as well as drug development

Facing the explosive growth of biological sequences unearthed in the post-genomic age, one of the most important but also most difficult problems in computational biology is how to express a biological sequence with a discrete model or a vector, but still keep it with considerable sequence-order information or its special pattern. To deal with such a challenging problem, the ideas of "pseudo amino acid components" and "pseudo K-tuple nucleotide composition" have been proposed. The ideas and their approaches have further stimulated the birth for "distorted key theory", "wenxing diagram", and substantially strengthening the power in treating the multi-label systems, as well as the establishment of the famous "5-steps rule". All these logic developments are quite natural that are very useful not only for theoretical scientists but also for experimental scientists in conducting genetics/genomics analysis and drug development. Presented in this review paper are also their future perspectives; i.e., their impacts will become even more significant and propounding.

Identifying anticancer peptides by using improved hybrid compositions

Cancer is one of the main causes of threats to human life. Identification of anticancer peptides is important for developing effective anticancer drugs. In this paper, we developed an improved predictor to identify the anticancer peptides. The amino acid composition (AAC), the average chemical shifts (acACS) and the reduced amino acid composition (RAAC) were selected to predict the anticancer peptides by using the support vector machine (SVM). The overall prediction accuracy reaches to 93.61% in jackknife test. The results indicated that the combined parameter was helpful to the prediction for anticancer peptides.

The recognition of multi-class protein folds by adding average chemical shifts of secondary structure elements

The recognition of protein folds is an important step in the prediction of protein structure and function. Recently, an increasing number of researchers have sought to improve the methods for protein fold recognition. Following the construction of a dataset consisting of 27 protein fold classes by Ding and Dubchak in 2001, prediction algorithms, parameters and the construction of new datasets have improved for the prediction of protein folds. In this study, we reorganized a dataset consisting of 76-fold classes constructed by Liu et al. and used the values of the increment of diversity, average chemical shifts of secondary structure elements and secondary structure motifs as feature parameters in the recognition of multi-class protein folds. With the combined feature vector as the input parameter for the Random Forests algorithm and ensemble classification strategy, we propose a novel method to identify the 76 protein fold classes. The overall accuracy of the test dataset using an independent test was 66.69%; when the training and test sets were combined, with 5-fold cross-validation, the overall accuracy was 73.43%. This method was further used to predict the test dataset and the corresponding structural classification of the first 27-protein fold class dataset, resulting in overall accuracies of 79.66% and 93.40%, respectively. Moreover, when the training set and test sets were combined, the accuracy using 5-fold cross-validation was 81.21%. Additionally, this approach resulted in improved prediction results using the 27-protein fold class dataset constructed by Ding and Dubchak.

DSPMP: Discriminating secretory proteins of malaria parasite by hybridizing different descriptors of Chou's pseudo amino acid patterns

Identification of the proteins secreted by the malaria parasite is important for developing effective drugs and vaccines against infection. Therefore, we developed an improved predictor called "DSPMP" (Discriminating Secretory Proteins of Malaria Parasite) to identify the secretory proteins of the malaria parasite by integrating several vector features using support vector machine-based methods. DSPMP achieved an overall predictive accuracy of 98.61%, which is superior to that of the existing predictors in this field. We show that our method is capable of identifying the secretory proteins of the malaria parasite and found that the amino acid composition for buried and exposed sequences, denoted by AAC(b/e), was the most important feature for constructing the predictor. This article not only introduces a novel method for detecting the important features of sample proteins related to the malaria parasite but also provides a useful tool for tackling general protein-related problems. The DSPMP webserver is freely available at http://202.207.14.87:8032/fuwu/DSPMP/index.asp.

Discriminating protein structure classes by incorporating Pseudo Average Chemical Shift to Chou's general PseAAC and Support Vector Machine

Proteins control all biological functions in living species. Protein structure is comprised of four major classes including all-α class, all-β class, α+β, and α/β. Each class performs different function according to their nature. Owing to the large exploration of protein sequences in the databanks, the identification of protein structure classes is difficult through conventional methods with respect to cost and time. Looking at the importance of protein structure classes, it is thus highly desirable to develop a computational model for discriminating protein structure classes with high accuracy. For this purpose, we propose a silco method by incorporating Pseudo Average Chemical Shift and Support Vector Machine. Two feature extraction schemes namely Pseudo Amino Acid Composition and Pseudo Average Chemical Shift are used to explore valuable information from protein sequences. The performance of the proposed model is assessed using four benchmark datasets 25PDB, 1189, 640 and 399 employing jackknife test. The success rates of the proposed model are 84.2%, 85.0%, 86.4%, and 89.2%, respectively on the four datasets. The empirical results reveal that the performance of our proposed model compared to existing models is promising in the literature so far and might be useful for future research.

acACS: improving the prediction accuracy of protein subcellular locations and protein classification by incorporating the average chemical shifts composition

The chemical shift is sensitive to changes in the local environments and can report the structural changes. The structure information of a protein can be represented by the average chemical shifts (ACS) composition, which has been broadly applied for enhancing the prediction accuracy in protein subcellular locations and protein classification. However, different kinds of ACS composition can solve different problems. We established an online web server named acACS, which can convert secondary structure into average chemical shift and then compose the vector for representing a protein by using the algorithm of auto covariance. Our solution is easy to use and can meet the needs of users.

AcalPred: a sequence-based tool for discriminating between acidic and alkaline enzymes

The structure and activity of enzymes are influenced by pH value of their surroundings. Although many enzymes work well in the pH range from 6 to 8, some specific enzymes have good efficiencies only in acidic (pH<5) or alkaline (pH>9) solution. Studies have demonstrated that the activities of enzymes correlate with their primary sequences. It is crucial to judge enzyme adaptation to acidic or alkaline environment from its amino acid sequence in molecular mechanism clarification and the design of high efficient enzymes. In this study, we developed a sequence-based method to discriminate acidic enzymes from alkaline enzymes. The analysis of variance was used to choose the optimized discriminating features derived from g-gap dipeptide compositions. And support vector machine was utilized to establish the prediction model. In the rigorous jackknife cross-validation, the overall accuracy of 96.7% was achieved. The method can correctly predict 96.3% acidic and 97.1% alkaline enzymes. Through the comparison between the proposed method and previous methods, it is demonstrated that the proposed method is more accurate. On the basis of this proposed method, we have built an online web-server called AcalPred which can be freely accessed from the website (http://lin.uestc.edu.cn/server/AcalPred). We believe that the AcalPred will become a powerful tool to study enzyme adaptation to acidic or alkaline environment.