Improving protein fold recognition using the amalgamation of evolutionary-based and structural based information

An Enhanced Protein Fold Recognition for Low Similarity Datasets Using Convolutional and Skip-Gram Features With Deep Neural Network

The protein fold recognition is one of the important tasks of structural biology, which helps in addressing further challenges like predicting the protein tertiary structures and its functions. Many machine learning works are published to identify the protein folds effectively. However, very few works have reported the fold recognition accuracy above 80% on benchmark datasets. In this study, an effective set of global and local features are extracted from the proposed Convolutional (Conv) and SkipXGram bi-gram (SXGbg) techniques, and the fold recognition is performed using the proposed deep neural network. The performance of the proposed model reported 91.4% fold accuracy on one of the derived low similarity (< 25%) datasets of latest extended version of SCOPe_2.07. The proposed model is further evaluated on three popular and publicly available benchmark datasets such as DD, EDD, and TG and obtained 85.9%, 95.8%, and 88.8% fold accuracies, respectively. This work is first to report fold recognition accuracy above 85% on all the benchmark datasets. The performance of the proposed model has outperformed the best state-of-the-art models by 5% to 23% on DD, 2% to 19% on EDD, and 3% to 30% on TG dataset.

DeepFrag-k: a fragment-based deep learning approach for protein fold recognition

BACKGROUND

One of the most essential problems in structural bioinformatics is protein fold recognition. In this paper, we design a novel deep learning architecture, so-called DeepFrag-k, which identifies fold discriminative features at fragment level to improve the accuracy of protein fold recognition. DeepFrag-k is composed of two stages: the first stage employs a multi-modal Deep Belief Network (DBN) to predict the potential structural fragments given a sequence, represented as a fragment vector, and then the second stage uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the fragment vector into the corresponding fold.

RESULTS

Our results show that DeepFrag-k yields 92.98% accuracy in predicting the top-100 most popular fragments, which can be used to generate discriminative fragment feature vectors to improve protein fold recognition.

CONCLUSIONS

There is a set of fragments that can serve as structural "keywords" distinguishing between major protein folds. The deep learning architecture in DeepFrag-k is able to accurately identify these fragments as structure features to improve protein fold recognition.

A Systematic Review on Popularity, Application and Characteristics of Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Tools

BACKGROUND

Prediction of proteins' secondary structure is one of the major steps in the generation of homology models. These models provide structural information which is used to design suitable ligands for potential medicinal targets. However, selecting a proper tool between multiple Secondary Structure Prediction (SSP) options is challenging. The current study is an insight into currently favored methods and tools, within various contexts.

OBJECTIVE

A systematic review was performed for a comprehensive access to recent (2013-2016) studies which used or recommended protein SSP tools.

METHODS

Three databases, Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus were systematically searched and 99 out of the 209 studies were finally found eligible to extract data.

RESULTS

Four categories of applications for 59 retrieved SSP tools were: (I) prediction of structural features of a given sequence, (II) evaluation of a method, (III) providing input for a new SSP method and (IV) integrating an SSP tool as a component for a program. PSIPRED was found to be the most popular tool in all four categories. JPred and tools utilizing PHD (Profile network from HeiDelberg) method occupied second and third places of popularity in categories I and II. JPred was only found in the two first categories, while PHD was present in three fields.

CONCLUSION

This study provides a comprehensive insight into the recent usage of SSP tools which could be helpful for selecting a proper tool.

A Novel Amino Acid Properties Selection Method for Protein Fold Classification

BACKGROUND

Amino acid physicochemical properties encoded in protein primary structure play a crucial role in protein folding. However, it is not yet clear which of the properties are the most suitable for protein fold classification.

OBJECTIVE

To avoid exhaustively searching the total properties space, an amino acid properties selection method was proposed in this study to rapidly obtain a suitable properties combination for protein fold classification.

METHODS

The proposed amino acid properties selection method was based on sequential floating forward selection strategy. Beginning with an empty set, variable number of features were added iteratively until achieving the iteration termination condition.

RESULTS

The experimental results indicate that the proposed method improved prediction accuracies by 0.26-5% on a widely used benchmark dataset with appropriately selected amino acid properties.

CONCLUSION

The proposed properties selection method can be extended to other biomolecule property related classification problems in bioinformatics.

Relevance of Machine Learning Techniques and Various Protein Features in Protein Fold Classification: A Review

Background:

Protein fold prediction is a fundamental step in Structural Bioinformatics. The tertiary structure of a protein determines its function and to predict its tertiary structure, fold prediction serves an important role. Protein fold is simply the arrangement of the secondary structure elements relative to each other in space. A number of studies have been carried out till date by different research groups working worldwide in this field by using the combination of different benchmark datasets, different types of descriptors, features and classification techniques.

Objective:

In this study, we have tried to put all these contributions together, analyze their study and to compare different techniques used by them.

Methods:

Different features are derived from protein sequence, its secondary structure, different physicochemical properties of amino acids, domain composition, Position Specific Scoring Matrix, profile and threading techniques.

Conclusion:

Combination of these different features can improve classification accuracy to a large extent. With the help of this survey, one can know the most suitable feature/attribute set and classification technique for this multi-class protein fold classification problem.

HseSUMO: Sumoylation site prediction using half-sphere exposures of amino acids residues

Background

Post-translational modifications are viewed as an important mechanism for controlling protein function and are believed to be involved in multiple important diseases. However, their profiling using laboratory-based techniques remain challenging. Therefore, making the development of accurate computational methods to predict post-translational modifications is particularly important for making progress in this area of research.

Results

This work explores the use of four half-sphere exposure-based features for computational prediction of sumoylation sites. Unlike most of the previously proposed approaches, which focused on patterns of amino acid co-occurrence, we were able to demonstrate that protein structural based features could be sufficiently informative to achieve good predictive performance. The evaluation of our method has demonstrated high sensitivity (0.9), accuracy (0.89) and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (0.78–0.79). We have compared these results to the recently released pSumo-CD method and were able to demonstrate better performance of our method on the same evaluation dataset.

Conclusions

The proposed predictor HseSUMO uses half-sphere exposures of amino acids to predict sumoylation sites. It has shown promising results on a benchmark dataset when compared with the state-of-the-art method.

The extracted data of this study can be accessed at https://github.com/YosvanyLopez/HseSUMO.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-018-5206-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

SumSec: Accurate Prediction of Sumoylation Sites Using Predicted Secondary Structure

Post Translational Modification (PTM) is defined as the modification of amino acids along the protein sequences after the translation process. These modifications significantly impact on the functioning of proteins. Therefore, having a comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanism of PTMs turns out to be critical in studying the biological roles of proteins. Among a wide range of PTMs, sumoylation is one of the most important modifications due to its known cellular functions which include transcriptional regulation, protein stability, and protein subcellular localization. Despite its importance, determining sumoylation sites via experimental methods is time-consuming and costly. This has led to a great demand for the development of fast computational methods able to accurately determine sumoylation sites in proteins. In this study, we present a new machine learning-based method for predicting sumoylation sites called SumSec. To do this, we employed the predicted secondary structure of amino acids to extract two types of structural features from neighboring amino acids along the protein sequence which has never been used for this task. As a result, our proposed method is able to enhance the sumoylation site prediction task, outperforming previously proposed methods in the literature. SumSec demonstrated high sensitivity (0.91), accuracy (0.94) and MCC (0.88). The prediction accuracy achieved in this study is 21% better than those reported in previous studies. The script and extracted features are publicly available at: https://github.com/YosvanyLopez/SumSec.

A Model Stacking Framework for Identifying DNA Binding Proteins by Orchestrating Multi-View Features and Classifiers

Nowadays, various machine learning-based approaches using sequence information alone have been proposed for identifying DNA-binding proteins, which are crucial to many cellular processes, such as DNA replication, DNA repair and DNA modification. Among these methods, building a meaningful feature representation of the sequences and choosing an appropriate classifier are the most trivial tasks. Disclosing the significances and contributions of different feature spaces and classifiers to the final prediction is of the utmost importance, not only for the prediction performances, but also the practical clues of biological experiment designs. In this study, we propose a model stacking framework by orchestrating multi-view features and classifiers (MSFBinder) to investigate how to integrate and evaluate loosely-coupled models for predicting DNA-binding proteins. The framework integrates multi-view features including Local_DPP, 188D, Position-Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM)_DWT and autocross-covariance of secondary structures(AC_Struc), which were extracted based on evolutionary information, sequence composition, physiochemical properties and predicted structural information, respectively. These features are fed into various loosely-coupled classifiers such as SVM and random forest. Then, a logistic regression model was applied to evaluate the contributions of these individual classifiers and to make the final prediction. When performing on the training dataset PDB1075, the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 83.53%. On the independent dataset PDB186, the method achieves an accuracy of 81.72%, which outperforms many existing methods. These results suggest that the framework is able to orchestrate various predicted models flexibly with good performances.

Improving succinylation prediction accuracy by incorporating the secondary structure via helix, strand and coil, and evolutionary information from profile bigrams

Post-translational modification refers to the biological mechanism involved in the enzymatic modification of proteins after being translated in the ribosome. This mechanism comprises a wide range of structural modifications, which bring dramatic variations to the biological function of proteins. One of the recently discovered modifications is succinylation. Although succinylation can be detected through mass spectrometry, its current experimental detection turns out to be a timely process unable to meet the exponential growth of sequenced proteins. Therefore, the implementation of fast and accurate computational methods has emerged as a feasible solution. This paper proposes a novel classification approach, which effectively incorporates the secondary structure and evolutionary information of proteins through profile bigrams for succinylation prediction. The proposed predictor, abbreviated as SSEvol-Suc, made use of the above features for training an AdaBoost classifier and consequently predicting succinylated lysine residues. When SSEvol-Suc was compared with four benchmark predictors, it outperformed them in metrics such as sensitivity (0.909), accuracy (0.875) and Matthews correlation coefficient (0.75).

ProFold: Protein Fold Classification with Additional Structural Features and a Novel Ensemble Classifier

Protein fold classification plays an important role in both protein functional analysis and drug design. The number of proteins in PDB is very large, but only a very small part is categorized and stored in the SCOPe database. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient method for protein fold classification. In recent years, a variety of classification methods have been used in many protein fold classification studies. In this study, we propose a novel classification method called proFold. We import protein tertiary structure in the period of feature extraction and employ a novel ensemble strategy in the period of classifier training. Compared with existing similar ensemble classifiers using the same widely used dataset (DD-dataset), proFold achieves 76.2% overall accuracy. Another two commonly used datasets, EDD-dataset and TG-dataset, are also tested, of which the accuracies are 93.2% and 94.3%, higher than the existing methods. ProFold is available to the public as a web-server.

Improving the Prediction of Protein Structural Class for Low-Similarity Sequences by Incorporating Evolutionaryand Structural Information

Protein structural class prediction is beneficial to study protein function, regulation and interactions. However, protein structural class prediction for low-similarity sequences (i.e., below 40% in pairwise sequence similarity) remains a challenging problem at present. In this study, a novel computational method is proposed to accurately predict protein structural class for low-similarity sequences. This method is based on support vector machine in conjunction with integrated features from evolutionary information generated with position specific iterative basic local alignment search tool (PSI-BLAST) and predicted secondary structure. Various prediction accuracies evaluated by the jackknife tests are reported on two widely-used low-similarity benchmark datasets (25PDB and 1189), reaching overall accuracies 89.3% and 87.9%, which are significantly higher than those achieved by state-of-the-art in protein structural class prediction. The experimental results suggest that our method could serve as an effective alternative to existing methods in protein structural classification, especially for low-similarity sequences.

Improving protein fold recognition and structural class prediction accuracies using physicochemical properties of amino acids

Predicting the three-dimensional (3-D) structure of a protein is an important task in the field of bioinformatics and biological sciences. However, directly predicting the 3-D structure from the primary structure is hard to achieve. Therefore, predicting the fold or structural class of a protein sequence is generally used as an intermediate step in determining the protein's 3-D structure. For protein fold recognition (PFR) and structural class prediction (SCP), two steps are required - feature extraction step and classification step. Feature extraction techniques generally utilize syntactical-based information, evolutionary-based information and physicochemical-based information to extract features. In this study, we explore the importance of utilizing the physicochemical properties of amino acids for improving PFR and SCP accuracies. For this, we propose a Forward Consecutive Search (FCS) scheme which aims to strategically select physicochemical attributes that will supplement the existing feature extraction techniques for PFR and SCP. An exhaustive search is conducted on all the existing 544 physicochemical attributes using the proposed FCS scheme and a subset of physicochemical attributes is identified. Features extracted from these selected attributes are then combined with existing syntactical-based and evolutionary-based features, to show an improvement in the recognition and prediction performance on benchmark datasets.

InCoB2014: bioinformatics to tackle the data to knowledge challenge. Introduction

Since 2006, the International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB) has been publishing selected papers in BMC Bioinformatics. Papers within the scope of the journal from the 13th InCoB July 31-2 August, 2014 in Sydney, Australia have been compiled in this supplement. These span protein and proteome informatics, structural bioinformatics, software development and bioimaging to pharmacoinformatics and disease informatics, representing the breadth of bioinformatics research in the Asia-Pacific.