Formator: Predicting Lysine Formylation Sites Based on the Most Distant Undersampling and Safe-Level Synthetic Minority Oversampling

EnILs: A General Ensemble Computational Approach for Predicting Inducing Peptides of Multiple Interleukins

Interleukins (ILs) are a group of multifunctional cytokines, which play important roles in immune regulations and inflammatory responses. Recently, IL-6 has been found to affect the development of COVID-19, and significantly elevated levels of IL-6 cytokines have been reported in patients with severe COVID-19. IL-10 and IL-17 are anti-inflammatory and proinflammatory cytokines, respectively, which play multiple protective roles in host defense against pathogens. At present, a number of machine learning methods have been proposed to predict ILs inducing peptides, but their predictive performance needs to be further improved, and the inducing peptides of different ILs are predicted separately, rather than using a general approach. In our work, we combine the statistical features of peptide sequence with word embedding to design a general ensemble model named EnILs to predict inducing peptides of different ILs, in which the predictive probabilities of random forest, eXtreme Gradient Boosting and neural network are integrated in an average way. Compared with the state-of-the-art machine learning methods, EnILs shows considerable performance in the prediction of IL-6, IL-10, and IL-17 inducing peptides. In addition, we predict the most promising IL-6 inducing peptides in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 spike protein in the case study for further experimental verification.

predML-Site: Predicting Multiple Lysine PTM Sites With Optimal Feature Representation and Data Imbalance Minimization

Identifying of post-translational modifications (PTM) is crucial in the study of computational proteomics, cell biology, pathogenesis, and drug development due to its role in many bio-molecular mechanisms. Computational methods for predicting multiple PTM at the same lysine residues, often referred to as K-PTM, is still evolving. This paper presents a novel computational tool, abbreviated as predML-Site, for predicting KPTM, such as acetylation, crotonylation, methylation, succinylation from an uncategorized peptide sample involving single, multiple, or no modification. For informative feature representation, multiple sequence encoding schemes, such as the sequence-coupling, binary encoding, k-spaced amino acid pairs, amino acid factor have been used with ANOVA and incremental feature selection. As a core predictor, a cost-sensitive SVM classifier has been adopted which effectively mitigates the effect of class-label imbalance in the dataset. predML-Site predicts multi-label PTM sites with 84.18% accuracy using the top 91 features. It has also achieved 85.34% aiming and 86.58% coverage rate which are much better than the existing state-of-the-art predictors on the same rigorous validation test. This performance indicates that predML-Site can be used as a supportive tool for further K-PTM study. For the convenience of the experimental scientists, predML-Site has been deployed as a user-friendly web-server at http://103.99.176.239/predML-Site.

PLP_FS: prediction of lysine phosphoglycerylation sites in protein using support vector machine and fusion of multiple F_Score feature selection

A newly invented post-translational modification (PTM), phosphoglycerylation, has shown its essential role in the construction and functional properties of proteins and dangerous human diseases. Hence, it is very urgent to know about the molecular mechanism behind the phosphoglycerylation process to develop the drugs for related diseases. But accurately identifying of phosphoglycerylation site from a protein sequence in a laboratory is a very difficult and challenging task. Hence, the construction of an efficient computation model is greatly sought for this purpose. A little number of computational models are currently available for identifying the phosphoglycerylation sites, which are not able to reach their prediction capability at a satisfactory level. Therefore, an effective predictor named PLP_FS has been designed and constructed to identify phosphoglycerylation sites in this study. For the training purpose, an optimal number of feature sets was obtained by fusion of multiple F_Score feature selection techniques from the features generated by three types of sequence-based feature extraction methods and fitted with the support vector machine classification technique to the prediction model. On the other hand, the k-neighbor near cleaning and SMOTE methods were also implemented to balance the benchmark dataset. The suggested model in 10-fold cross-validation obtained an accuracy of 99.22%, a sensitivity of 98.17% and a specificity of 99.75% according to the experimental findings, which are better than other currently available predictors for accurately identifying the phosphoglycerylation sites.

Critical assessment of computational tools for prokaryotic and eukaryotic promoter prediction

Promoters are crucial regulatory DNA regions for gene transcriptional activation. Rapid advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have accelerated the accumulation of genome sequences, providing increased training data to inform computational approaches for both prokaryotic and eukaryotic promoter prediction. However, it remains a significant challenge to accurately identify species-specific promoter sequences using computational approaches. To advance computational support for promoter prediction, in this study, we curated 58 comprehensive, up-to-date, benchmark datasets for 7 different species (i.e. Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Arabidopsis thaliana, Zea mays and Drosophila melanogaster) to assist the research community to assess the relative functionality of alternative approaches and support future research on both prokaryotic and eukaryotic promoters. We revisited 106 predictors published since 2000 for promoter identification (40 for prokaryotic promoter, 61 for eukaryotic promoter, and 5 for both). We systematically evaluated their training datasets, computational methodologies, calculated features, performance and software usability. On the basis of these benchmark datasets, we benchmarked 19 predictors with functioning webservers/local tools and assessed their prediction performance. We found that deep learning and traditional machine learning-based approaches generally outperformed scoring function-based approaches. Taken together, the curated benchmark dataset repository and the benchmarking analysis in this study serve to inform the design and implementation of computational approaches for promoter prediction and facilitate more rigorous comparison of new techniques in the future.

O-glycosylation site prediction for Homo sapiens by combining properties and sequence features with support vector machine

O-glycosylation is a protein posttranslational modification important in regulating almost all cells. It is related to a large number of physiological and pathological phenomena. Recognizing O-glycosylation sites is the key to further investigating the molecular mechanism of protein posttranslational modification. This study aimed to collect a reliable dataset on Homo sapiens and develop an O-glycosylation predictor for Homo sapiens, named Captor, through multiple features. A random undersampling method and a synthetic minority oversampling technique were employed to deal with imbalanced data. In addition, the Kruskal-Wallis (K-W) test was adopted to optimize feature vectors and improve the performance of the model. A support vector machine, due to its optimal performance, was used to train and optimize the final prediction model after a comprehensive comparison of various classifiers in traditional machine learning methods and deep learning. On the independent test set, Captor outperformed the existing O-glycosylation tool, suggesting that Captor could provide more instructive guidance for further experimental research on O-glycosylation. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/YanZhu06/Captor/.

predForm-Site: Formylation site prediction by incorporating multiple features and resolving data imbalance

Formylation is one of the newly discovered post-translational modifications in lysine residue which is responsible for different kinds of diseases. In this work, a novel predictor, named predForm-Site, has been developed to predict formylation sites with higher accuracy. We have integrated multiple sequence features for developing a more informative representation of formylation sites. Moreover, decision function of the underlying classifier have been optimized on skewed formylation dataset during prediction model training for prediction quality improvement. On the dataset used by LFPred and Formator predictor, predForm-Site achieved 99.5% sensitivity, 99.8% specificity and 99.8% overall accuracy with AUC of 0.999 in the jackknife test. In the independent test, it has also achieved more than 97% sensitivity and 99% specificity. Similarly, in benchmarking with recent method CKSAAP_FormSite, the proposed predictor significantly outperformed in all the measures, particularly sensitivity by around 20%, specificity by nearly 30% and overall accuracy by more than 22%. These experimental results show that the proposed predForm-Site can be used as a complementary tool for the fast exploration of formylation sites. For convenience of the scientific community, predForm-Site has been deployed as an online tool, accessible at http://103.99.176.239:8080/predForm-Site.

predPhogly-Site: Predicting phosphoglycerylation sites by incorporating probabilistic sequence-coupling information into PseAAC and addressing data imbalance

Post-translational modification (PTM) involves covalent modification after the biosynthesis process and plays an essential role in the study of cell biology. Lysine phosphoglycerylation, a newly discovered reversible type of PTM that affects glycolytic enzyme activities, and is responsible for a wide variety of diseases, such as heart failure, arthritis, and degeneration of the nervous system. Our goal is to computationally characterize potential phosphoglycerylation sites to understand the functionality and causality more accurately. In this study, a novel computational tool, referred to as predPhogly-Site, has been developed to predict phosphoglycerylation sites in the protein. It has effectively utilized the probabilistic sequence-coupling information among the nearby amino acid residues of phosphoglycerylation sites along with a variable cost adjustment for the skewed training dataset to enhance the prediction characteristics. It has achieved around 99% accuracy with more than 0.96 MCC and 0.97 AUC in both 10-fold cross-validation and independent test. Even, the standard deviation in 10-fold cross-validation is almost negligible. This performance indicates that predPhogly-Site remarkably outperformed the existing prediction tools and can be used as a promising predictor, preferably with its web interface at http://103.99.176.239/predPhogly-Site.

Computational identification of eukaryotic promoters based on cascaded deep capsule neural networks

A promoter is a region in the DNA sequence that defines where the transcription of a gene by RNA polymerase initiates, which is typically located proximal to the transcription start site (TSS). How to correctly identify the gene TSS and the core promoter is essential for our understanding of the transcriptional regulation of genes. As a complement to conventional experimental methods, computational techniques with easy-to-use platforms as essential bioinformatics tools can be effectively applied to annotate the functions and physiological roles of promoters. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based method termed Depicter (Deep learning for predicting promoter), for identifying three specific types of promoters, i.e. promoter sequences with the TATA-box (TATA model), promoter sequences without the TATA-box (non-TATA model), and indistinguishable promoters (TATA and non-TATA model). Depicter is developed based on an up-to-date, species-specific dataset which includes Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana promoters. A convolutional neural network coupled with capsule layers is proposed to train and optimize the prediction model of Depicter. Extensive benchmarking and independent tests demonstrate that Depicter achieves an improved predictive performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods. The webserver of Depicter is implemented and freely accessible at https://depicter.erc.monash.edu/.

Pippin: A random forest-based method for identifying presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins

Presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins are two types of neurotoxins from venomous animals and functionally important molecules in the neurosciences; however, their experimental characterization is difficult, time-consuming, and costly. Therefore, bioinformatics tools that can identify presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins would be very useful for understanding their functions and mechanisms. In this study, we propose Pippin, a novel machine learning-based method that allows users to rapidly and accurately identify these two types of neurotoxins. Pippin was developed using the random forest (RF) algorithm and evaluated based on an up-to-date dataset. A variety of sequence and motif features were combined, and a two-step feature-selection algorithm was employed to characterize the optimal feature subset for presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxin prediction. Extensive benchmark tests illustrate that Pippin significantly improved predictive performance as compared with six other commonly used machine-learning algorithms, including the naïve Bayes classifier, Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier (MNBC), AdaBoost, Bagging, K-nearest neighbors, and XGBoost. Additionally, we developed an online webserver for Pippin to facilitate public use. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first webserver for presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxin prediction.

Computational prediction and interpretation of both general and specific types of promoters in Escherichia coli by exploiting a stacked ensemble-learning framework

Promoters are short consensus sequences of DNA, which are responsible for transcription activation or the repression of all genes. There are many types of promoters in bacteria with important roles in initiating gene transcription. Therefore, solving promoter-identification problems has important implications for improving the understanding of their functions. To this end, computational methods targeting promoter classification have been established; however, their performance remains unsatisfactory. In this study, we present a novel stacked-ensemble approach (termed SELECTOR) for identifying both promoters and their respective classification. SELECTOR combined the composition of k-spaced nucleic acid pairs, parallel correlation pseudo-dinucleotide composition, position-specific trinucleotide propensity based on single-strand, and DNA strand features and using five popular tree-based ensemble learning algorithms to build a stacked model. Both 5-fold cross-validation tests using benchmark datasets and independent tests using the newly collected independent test dataset showed that SELECTOR outperformed state-of-the-art methods in both general and specific types of promoter prediction in Escherichia coli. Furthermore, this novel framework provides essential interpretations that aid understanding of model success by leveraging the powerful Shapley Additive exPlanation algorithm, thereby highlighting the most important features relevant for predicting both general and specific types of promoters and overcoming the limitations of existing 'Black-box' approaches that are unable to reveal causal relationships from large amounts of initially encoded features.