A novel representation of protein sequences for prediction of subcellular location using support vector machines

As the number of complete genomes rapidly increases, accurate methods to automatically predict the subcellular location of proteins are increasingly useful to help their functional annotation. In order to improve the predictive accuracy of the many prediction methods developed to date, a novel representation of protein sequences is proposed. This representation involves local compositions of amino acids and twin amino acids, and local frequencies of distance between successive (basic, hydrophobic, and other) amino acids. For calculating the local features, each sequence is split into three parts: N-terminal, middle, and C-terminal. The N-terminal part is further divided into four regions to consider ambiguity in the length and position of signal sequences. We tested this representation with support vector machines on two data sets extracted from the SWISS-PROT database. Through fivefold cross-validation tests, overall accuracies of more than 87% and 91% were obtained for eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteins, respectively. It is concluded that considering the respective features in the N-terminal, middle, and C-terminal parts is helpful to predict the subcellular location.     

Support vector machines for prediction of protein subcellular location by incorporating quasi-sequence-order effect.

Support Vector Machine (SVM), which is one class of learning machines, was applied to predict the subcellular location of proteins by incorporating the quasi-sequence-order effect (Chou [2000] Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 278:477-483). In this study, the proteins are classified into the following 12 groups: (1) chloroplast, (2) cytoplasm, (3) cytoskeleton, (4) endoplasmic reticulum, (5) extracellular, (6) Golgi apparatus, (7) lysosome, (8) mitochondria, (9) nucleus, (10) peroxisome, (11) plasma membrane, and (12) vacuole, which account for most organelles and subcellular compartments in an animal or plant cell. Examinations for self-consistency and jackknife testing of the SVMs method were conducted for three sets consisting of 1,911, 2,044, and 2,191 proteins. The correct rates for self-consistency and the jackknife test values achieved with these protein sets were 94 and 83% for 1,911 proteins, 92 and 78% for 2,044 proteins, and 89 and 75% for 2,191 proteins, respectively. Furthermore, tests for correct prediction rates were undertaken with three independent testing datasets containing 2,148 proteins, 2,417 proteins, and 2,494 proteins producing values of 84, 77, and 74%, respectively.     

Support vector machines for predicting membrane protein types by using functional domain composition

Membrane proteins are generally classified into the following five types: 1), type I membrane protein; 2), type II membrane protein; 3), multipass transmembrane proteins; 4), lipid chain-anchored membrane proteins; and 5), GPI-anchored membrane proteins. In this article, based on the concept of using the functional domain composition to define a protein, the Support Vector Machine algorithm is developed for predicting the membrane protein type. High success rates are obtained by both the self-consistency and jackknife tests. The current approach, complemented with the powerful covariant discriminant algorithm based on the pseudo-amino acid composition that has incorporated quasi-sequence-order effect as recently proposed by K. C. Chou (2001), may become a very useful high-throughput tool in the area of bioinformatics and proteomics.     

Nearest neighbour algorithm for predicting protein subcellular location by combining functional domain composition and pseudo-amino acid composition

In this paper, based on the approach by combining the "functional domain composition" [K.C. Chou, Y. D. Cai, J. Biol. Chem. 277 (2002) 45765] and the pseudo-amino acid composition [K.C. Chou, Proteins Struct. Funct. Genet. 43 (2001) 246; Correction Proteins Struct. Funct. Genet. 2044 (2001) 2060], the Nearest Neighbour Algorithm (NNA) was developed for predicting the protein subcellular location. Very high success rates were observed, suggesting that such a hybrid approach may become a useful high-throughput tool in the area of bioinformatics and proteomics.     

Support vector machines for prediction of protein domain structural class

The support vector machines (SVMs) method was introduced for predicting the structural class of protein domains. The results obtained through the self-consistency test, jack-knife test, and independent dataset test have indicated that the current method and the elegant component-coupled algorithm developed by Chou and co-workers, if effectively complemented with each other, may become a powerful tool for predicting the structural class of protein domains.     

Transmembrane protein topology prediction using support vector machines

Background  

Alpha-helical transmembrane (TM) proteins are involved in a wide range of important biological processes such as cell signaling, transport of membrane-impermeable molecules, cell-cell communication, cell recognition and cell adhesion. Many are also prime drug targets, and it has been estimated that more than half of all drugs currently on the market target membrane proteins. However, due to the experimental difficulties involved in obtaining high quality crystals, this class of protein is severely under-represented in structural databases. In the absence of structural data, sequence-based prediction methods allow TM protein topology to be investigated.     

Prediction of protein subcellular localization by support vector machines using multi-scale energy and pseudo amino acid composition

As more and more genomes have been discovered in recent years, there is an urgent need to develop a reliable method to predict the subcellular localization for the explosion of newly found proteins. However, many well-known prediction methods based on amino acid composition have problems utilizing the sequence-order information. Here, based on the concept of Chou's pseudo amino acid composition (PseAA), a new feature extraction method, the multi-scale energy (MSE) approach, is introduced to incorporate the sequence-order information. First, a protein sequence was mapped to a digital signal using the amino acid index. Then, by wavelet transform, the mapped signal was broken down into several scales in which the energy factors were calculated and further formed into an MSE feature vector. Following this, combining this MSE feature vector with amino acid composition (AA), we constructed a series of MSEPseAA feature vectors to represent the protein subcellular localization sequences. Finally, according to a new kind of normalization approach, the MSEPseAA feature vectors were normalized to form the improved MSEPseAA vectors, named as IEPseAA. Using the technique of IEPseAA, C-support vector machine (C-SVM) and three multi-class SVMs strategies, quite promising results were obtained, indicating that MSE is quite effective in reflecting the sequence-order effects and might become a useful tool for predicting the other attributes of proteins as well.     

Improved prediction of subcellular location for apoptosis proteins by the dual-layer support vector machine

Apoptosis proteins play an important role in the development and homeostasis of an organism. The accurate prediction of subcellular location for apoptosis proteins is very helpful for understanding the mechanism of apoptosis and their biological functions. However, most of the existing predictive methods are designed by utilizing a single classifier, which would limit the further improvement of their performances. In this paper, a novel predictive method, which is essentially a multi-classifier system, has been proposed by combing a dual-layer support vector machine (SVM) with multiple compositions including amino acid composition (AAC), dipeptide composition (DPC) and amphiphilic pseudo amino acid composition (Am-Pse-AAC). As a demonstration, the predictive performance of our method was evaluated on two datasets of apoptosis proteins, involving the standard dataset ZD98 generated by Zhou and Doctor, and a larger dataset ZW225 generated by Zhang et al. With the jackknife test, the overall accuracies of our method on the two datasets reach 94.90% and 88.44%, respectively. The promising results indicate that our method can be a complementary tool for the prediction of subcellular location.     

Subcellular location prediction of proteins using support vector machines with alignment of block sequences utilizing amino acid composition

Background  

Subcellular location prediction of proteins is an important and well-studied problem in bioinformatics. This is a problem of predicting which part in a cell a given protein is transported to, where an amino acid sequence of the protein is given as an input. This problem is becoming more important since information on subcellular location is helpful for annotation of proteins and genes and the number of complete genomes is rapidly increasing. Since existing predictors are based on various heuristics, it is important to develop a simple method with high prediction accuracies.     

Using pseudo amino acid composition and binary-tree support vector machines to predict protein structural classes

Compared with the conventional amino acid composition (AA), the pseudo amino acid composition (PseAA) as originally introduced by Chou can incorporate much more information of a protein sequence; this remarkably enhances the power to use a discrete model for predicting various attributes of a protein. In this study, based on the concept of Chou's PseAA, a 46-D (dimensional) PseAA was formulated to represent the sample of a protein and a new approach based on binary-tree support vector machines (BTSVMs) was proposed to predict the protein structural class. BTSVMs algorithm has the capability in solving the problem of unclassifiable data points in multi-class SVMs. The results by both the 10-fold cross-validation and jackknife tests demonstrate that the predictive performance using the new PseAA (46-D) is better than that of AA (20-D), which is widely used in many algorithms for protein structural class prediction. The results obtained by the new approach are quite encouraging, indicating that it can at least play a complimentary role to many of the existing methods and is a useful tool for predicting many other protein attributes as well.     

Prediction of subcellular protein localization based on functional domain composition

Assigning subcellular localization (SL) to proteins is one of the major tasks of functional proteomics. Despite the impressive technical advances of the past decades, it is still time-consuming and laborious to experimentally determine SL on a high throughput scale. Thus, computational predictions are the preferred method for large-scale assignment of protein SL, and if appropriate, followed up by experimental studies. In this report, using a machine learning approach, the Nearest Neighbor Algorithm (NNA), we developed a prediction system for protein SL in which we incorporated a protein functional domain profile. The overall accuracy achieved by this system is 93.96%. Furthermore, comparisons with other methods have been conducted to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our prediction system. We also provide an implementation of our Subcellular Location Prediction System (SLPS), which is available at http://pcal.biosino.org.     

Application of support vector machines for T-cell epitopes prediction

MOTIVATION: The T-cell receptor, a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecule, and a bound antigenic peptide, play major roles in the process of antigen-specific T-cell activation. T-cell recognition was long considered exquisitely specific. Recent data also indicate that it is highly flexible, and one receptor may recognize thousands of different peptides. Deciphering the patterns of peptides that elicit a MHC restricted T-cell response is critical for vaccine development. RESULTS: For the first time we develop a support vector machine (SVM) for T-cell epitope prediction with an MHC type I restricted T-cell clone. Using cross-validation, we demonstrate that SVMs can be trained on relatively small data sets to provide prediction more accurate than those based on previously published methods or on MHC binding. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Data for 203 synthesized peptides is available at http://linus.nci.nih.gov/Data/LAU203_Peptide.pdf     

A novel representation for apoptosis protein subcellular localization prediction using support vector machine

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, plays an important role in development of an organism. Obtaining information on subcellular location of apoptosis proteins is very helpful to understand the apoptosis mechanism. In this paper, based on the concept that the position distribution information of amino acids is closely related with the structure and function of proteins, we introduce the concept of distance frequency [Matsuda, S., Vert, J.P., Ueda, N., Toh, H., Akutsu, T., 2005. A novel representation of protein sequences for prediction of subcellular location using support vector machines. Protein Sci. 14, 2804-2813] and propose a novel way to calculate distance frequencies. In order to calculate the local features, each protein sequence is separated into p parts with the same length in our paper. Then we use the novel representation of protein sequences and adopt support vector machine to predict subcellular location. The overall prediction accuracy is significantly improved by jackknife test.     

Large-scale plant protein subcellular location prediction

Current plant genome sequencing projects have called for development of novel and powerful high throughput tools for timely annotating the subcellular location of uncharacterized plant proteins. In view of this, an ensemble classifier, Plant-PLoc, formed by fusing many basic individual classifiers, has been developed for large-scale subcellular location prediction for plant proteins. Each of the basic classifiers was engineered by the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) rule. Plant-PLoc discriminates plant proteins among the following 11 subcellular locations: (1) cell wall, (2) chloroplast, (3) cytoplasm, (4) endoplasmic reticulum, (5) extracell, (6) mitochondrion, (7) nucleus, (8) peroxisome, (9) plasma membrane, (10) plastid, and (11) vacuole. As a demonstration, predictions were performed on a stringent benchmark dataset in which none of the proteins included has > or =25% sequence identity to any other in a same subcellular location to avoid the homology bias. The overall success rate thus obtained was 32-51% higher than the rates obtained by the previous methods on the same benchmark dataset. The essence of Plant-PLoc in enhancing the prediction quality and its significance in biological applications are discussed. Plant-PLoc is accessible to public as a free web-server at: (http://202.120.37.186/bioinf/plant). Furthermore, for public convenience, results predicted by Plant-PLoc have been provided in a downloadable file at the same website for all plant protein entries in the Swiss-Prot database that do not have subcellular location annotations, or are annotated as being uncertain. The large-scale results will be updated twice a year to include new entries of plant proteins and reflect the continuous development of Plant-PLoc.     

Secondary structure prediction with support vector machines

MOTIVATION: A new method that uses support vector machines (SVMs) to predict protein secondary structure is described and evaluated. The study is designed to develop a reliable prediction method using an alternative technique and to investigate the applicability of SVMs to this type of bioinformatics problem. METHODS: Binary SVMs are trained to discriminate between two structural classes. The binary classifiers are combined in several ways to predict multi-class secondary structure. RESULTS: The average three-state prediction accuracy per protein (Q(3)) is estimated by cross-validation to be 77.07 +/- 0.26% with a segment overlap (Sov) score of 73.32 +/- 0.39%. The SVM performs similarly to the 'state-of-the-art' PSIPRED prediction method on a non-homologous test set of 121 proteins despite being trained on substantially fewer examples. A simple consensus of the SVM, PSIPRED and PROFsec achieves significantly higher prediction accuracy than the individual methods.     

Profiled support vector machines for antisense oligonucleotide efficacy prediction

Background  

This paper presents the use of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for prediction and analysis of antisense oligonucleotide (AO) efficacy. The collected database comprises 315 AO molecules including 68 features each, inducing a problem well-suited to SVMs. The task of feature selection is crucial given the presence of noisy or redundant features, and the well-known problem of the curse of dimensionality. We propose a two-stage strategy to develop an optimal model: (1) feature selection using correlation analysis, mutual information, and SVM-based recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE), and (2) AO prediction using standard and profiled SVM formulations. A profiled SVM gives different weights to different parts of the training data to focus the training on the most important regions.     

Protein subcellular localization prediction for Gram-negative bacteria using amino acid subalphabets and a combination of multiple support vector machines

Background  

Predicting the subcellular localization of proteins is important for determining the function of proteins. Previous works focused on predicting protein localization in Gram-negative bacteria obtained good results. However, these methods had relatively low accuracies for the localization of extracellular proteins. This paper studies ways to improve the accuracy for predicting extracellular localization in Gram-negative bacteria.     

Enhanced performance in prediction of protein active sites with THEMATICS and support vector machines

Theoretical microscopic titration curves (THEMATICS) is a computational method for the identification of active sites in proteins through deviations in computed titration behavior of ionizable residues. While the sensitivity to catalytic sites is high, the previously reported sensitivity to catalytic residues was not as high, about 50%. Here THEMATICS is combined with support vector machines (SVM) to improve sensitivity for catalytic residue prediction from protein 3D structure alone. For a test set of 64 proteins taken from the Catalytic Site Atlas (CSA), the average recall rate for annotated catalytic residues is 61%; good precision is maintained selecting only 4% of all residues. The average false positive rate, using the CSA annotations is only 3.2%, far lower than other 3D-structure-based methods. THEMATICS-SVM returns higher precision, lower false positive rate, and better overall performance, compared with other 3D-structure-based methods. Comparison is also made with the latest machine learning methods that are based on both sequence alignments and 3D structures. For annotated sets of well-characterized enzymes, THEMATICS-SVM performance compares very favorably with methods that utilize sequence homology. However, since THEMATICS depends only on the 3D structure of the query protein, no decline in performance is expected when applied to novel folds, proteins with few sequence homologues, or even orphan sequences. An extension of the method to predict non-ionizable catalytic residues is also presented. THEMATICS-SVM predicts a local network of ionizable residues with strong interactions between protonation events; this appears to be a special feature of enzyme active sites.     

Support vector machine approach for protein subcellular localization prediction

MOTIVATION: Subcellular localization is a key functional characteristic of proteins. A fully automatic and reliable prediction system for protein subcellular localization is needed, especially for the analysis of large-scale genome sequences. RESULTS: In this paper, Support Vector Machine has been introduced to predict the subcellular localization of proteins from their amino acid compositions. The total prediction accuracies reach 91.4% for three subcellular locations in prokaryotic organisms and 79.4% for four locations in eukaryotic organisms. Predictions by our approach are robust to errors in the protein N-terminal sequences. This new approach provides superior prediction performance compared with existing algorithms based on amino acid composition and can be a complementary method to other existing methods based on sorting signals. AVAILABILITY: A web server implementing the prediction method is available at http://www.bioinfo.tsinghua.edu.cn/SubLoc/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary material is available at http://www.bioinfo.tsinghua.edu.cn/SubLoc/.