KSIMC: Predicting Kinase⁻Substrate Interactions Based on Matrix Completion

Narrow funnel-like interaction energy distribution is an indicator of specific protein interaction partner

Protein interaction networks underlie countless biological mechanisms. However, most protein interaction predictions are based on biological evidence that are biased to well-known protein interaction or physical evidence that exhibits low accuracy for weak interactions and requires high computational power. In this study, a novel method has been suggested to predict protein interaction partners by investigating narrow funnel-like interaction energy distribution. In this study, it was demonstrated that various protein interactions including kinases and E3 ubiquitin ligases have narrow funnel-like interaction energy distribution. To analyze protein interaction distribution, modified scores of iRMS and TM-score are introduced. Then, using these scores, algorithm and deep learning model for prediction of protein interaction partner and substrate of kinase and E3 ubiquitin ligase were developed. The prediction accuracy was similar to or even better than that of yeast two-hybrid screening. Ultimately, this knowledge-free protein interaction prediction method will broaden our understanding of protein interaction networks.

GasPhos: Protein Phosphorylation Site Prediction Using a New Feature Selection Approach with a GA-Aided Ant Colony System

Protein phosphorylation is one of the most important post-translational modifications, and many biological processes are related to phosphorylation, such as DNA repair, transcriptional regulation and signal transduction and, therefore, abnormal regulation of phosphorylation usually causes diseases. If we can accurately predict human phosphorylation sites, this could help to solve human diseases. Therefore, we developed a kinase-specific phosphorylation prediction system, GasPhos, and proposed a new feature selection approach, called Gas, based on the ant colony system and a genetic algorithm and used performance evaluation strategies focused on different kinases to choose the best learning model. Gas uses the mean decrease Gini index (MDGI) as a heuristic value for path selection and adopts binary transformation strategies and new state transition rules. GasPhos can predict phosphorylation sites for six kinases and showed better performance than other phosphorylation prediction tools. The disease-related phosphorylated proteins that were predicted with GasPhos are also discussed. Finally, Gas can be applied to other issues that require feature selection, which could help to improve prediction performance.

Identifying Interactions Between Kinases and Substrates Based on Protein-Protein Interaction Network

Protein phosphorylation is a kind of important post-translational modification of protein, which plays a critical role in many biological processes of eukaryote. Identifying kinase-substrate interactions is helpful to understand the mechanism of many diseases. Many computational algorithms for kinase-substrate interactions identification have been proposed. However, most of those methods are mainly focused on utilizing protein local sequence information. In this article, we propose a new computational method to predict kinase-substrate interactions based on protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. Different from existing methods, the PPI network is utilized to measure the similarities of kinase-kinase and substrate-substrate, respectively. Then, the pairwise similarities of kinase-kinase and substrate-substrate are adjusted based on the assumption that the similarities of kinase-kinase and substrate-substrate are more reliable if they are in the same cluster. Finally, the bi-random walk is used to predict potential kinase-substrate interactions. The experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in performance. Furthermore, the case study demonstrates that it is effective in predicting potential kinase-substrate interactions.