Euk-PLoc: an ensemble classifier for large-scale eukaryotic protein subcellular location prediction

With the avalanche of newly-found protein sequences emerging in the post genomic era, it is highly desirable to develop an automated method for fast and reliably identifying their subcellular locations because knowledge thus obtained can provide key clues for revealing their functions and understanding how they interact with each other in cellular networking. However, predicting subcellular location of eukaryotic proteins is a challenging problem, particularly when unknown query proteins do not have significant homology to proteins of known subcellular locations and when more locations need to be covered. To cope with the challenge, protein samples are formulated by hybridizing the information derived from the gene ontology database and amphiphilic pseudo amino acid composition. Based on such a representation, a novel ensemble hybridization classifier was developed by fusing many basic individual classifiers through a voting system. Each of these basic classifiers was engineered by the KNN (K-Nearest Neighbor) principle. As a demonstration, a new benchmark dataset was constructed that covers the following 18 localizations: (1) cell wall, (2) centriole, (3) chloroplast, (4) cyanelle, (5) cytoplasm, (6) cytoskeleton, (7) endoplasmic reticulum, (8) extracell, (9) Golgi apparatus, (10) hydrogenosome, (11) lysosome, (12) mitochondria, (13) nucleus, (14) peroxisome, (15) plasma membrane, (16) plastid, (17) spindle pole body, and (18) vacuole. To avoid the homology bias, none of the proteins included has > or =25% sequence identity to any other in a same subcellular location. The overall success rates thus obtained via the 5-fold and jackknife cross-validation tests were 81.6 and 80.3%, respectively, which were 40-50% higher than those performed by the other existing methods on the same strict dataset. The powerful predictor, named "Euk-PLoc", is available as a web-server at http://202.120.37.186/bioinf/euk . Furthermore, to support the need of people working in the relevant areas, a downloadable file will be provided at the same website to list the results predicted by Euk-PLoc for all eukaryotic protein entries (excluding fragments) in 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 the new entries of eukaryotic proteins and reflect the continuous development of Euk-PLoc.     

Euk-mPLoc: a fusion classifier for large-scale eukaryotic protein subcellular location prediction by incorporating multiple sites

One of the critical challenges in predicting protein subcellular localization is how to deal with the case of multiple location sites. Unfortunately, so far, no efforts have been made in this regard except for the one focused on the proteins in budding yeast only. For most existing predictors, the multiple-site proteins are either excluded from consideration or assumed even not existing. Actually, proteins may simultaneously exist at, or move between, two or more different subcellular locations. For instance, according to the Swiss-Prot database (version 50.7, released 19-Sept-2006), among the 33,925 eukaryotic protein entries that have experimentally observed subcellular location annotations, 2715 have multiple location sites, meaning about 8% bearing the multiplex feature. Proteins with multiple locations or dynamic feature of this kind are particularly interesting because they may have some very special biological functions intriguing to investigators in both basic research and drug discovery. Meanwhile, according to the same Swiss-Prot database, the number of total eukaryotic protein entries (except those annotated with "fragment" or those with less than 50 amino acids) is 90,909, meaning a gap of (90,909-33,925) = 56,984 entries for which no knowledge is available about their subcellular locations. Although one can use the computational approach to predict the desired information for the blank, so far, all the existing methods for predicting eukaryotic protein subcellular localization are limited in the case of single location site only. To overcome such a barrier, a new ensemble classifier, named Euk-mPLoc, was developed that can be used to deal with the case of multiple location sites as well. Euk-mPLoc is freely accessible to the public as a Web server at http://202.120.37.186/bioinf/euk-multi. Meanwhile, to support the people working in the relevant areas, Euk-mPLoc has been used to identify all eukaryotic protein entries in the Swiss-Prot database that do not have subcellular location annotations or are annotated as being uncertain. The large-scale results thus obtained have been deposited at the same Web site via a downloadable file prepared with Microsoft Excel and named "Tab_Euk-mPLoc.xls". Furthermore, to include new entries of eukaryotic proteins and reflect the continuous development of Euk-mPLoc in both the coverage scope and prediction accuracy, we will timely update the downloadable file as well as the predictor, and keep users informed by publishing a short note in the Journal and making an announcement in the Web Page.     

Mito-GSAAC: mitochondria prediction using genetic ensemble classifier and split amino acid composition

Mitochondria are all-important organelles of eukaryotic cells since they are involved in processes associated with cellular mortality and human diseases. Therefore, trustworthy techniques are highly required for the identification of new mitochondrial proteins. We propose Mito-GSAAC system for prediction of mitochondrial proteins. The aim of this work is to investigate an effective feature extraction strategy and to develop an ensemble approach that can better exploit the advantages of this feature extraction strategy for mitochondria classification. We investigate four kinds of protein representations for prediction of mitochondrial proteins: amino acid composition, dipeptide composition, pseudo amino acid composition, and split amino acid composition (SAAC). Individual classifiers such as support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron, random forest, AdaBoost, and bagging are first trained. An ensemble classifier is then built using genetic programming (GP) for evolving a complex but effective decision space from the individual decision spaces of the trained classifiers. The highest prediction performance for Jackknife test is 92.62% using GP-based ensemble classifier on SAAC features, which is the highest accuracy, reported so far on the Mitochondria dataset being used. While on the Malaria Parasite Mitochondria dataset, the highest accuracy is obtained by SVM using SAAC and it is further enhanced to 93.21% using GP-based ensemble. It is observed that SAAC has better discrimination power for mitochondria prediction over the rest of the feature extraction strategies. Thus, the improved prediction performance is largely due to the better capability of SAAC for discriminating between mitochondria and non-mitochondria proteins at the N and C terminus and the effective combination capability of GP. Mito-GSAAC can be accessed at . It is expected that the novel approach and the accompanied predictor will have a major impact to Molecular Cell Biology, Proteomics, Bioinformatics, System Biology, and Drug Development.     

Hum-mPLoc: an ensemble classifier for large-scale human protein subcellular location prediction by incorporating samples with multiple sites

Proteins may simultaneously exist at, or move between, two or more different subcellular locations. Proteins with multiple locations or dynamic feature of this kind are particularly interesting because they may have some very special biological functions intriguing to investigators in both basic research and drug discovery. For instance, among the 6408 human protein entries that have experimentally observed subcellular location annotations in the Swiss-Prot database (version 50.7, released 19-Sept-2006), 973 ( approximately 15%) have multiple location sites. The number of total human protein entries (except those annotated with "fragment" or those with less than 50 amino acids) in the same database is 14,370, meaning a gap of (14,370-6408)=7962 entries for which no knowledge is available about their subcellular locations. Although one can use the computational approach to predict the desired information for the gap, so far all the existing methods for predicting human protein subcellular localization are limited in the case of single location site only. To overcome such a barrier, a new ensemble classifier, named Hum-mPLoc, was developed that can be used to deal with the case of multiple location sites as well. Hum-mPLoc is freely accessible to the public as a web server at http://202.120.37.186/bioinf/hum-multi. Meanwhile, for the convenience of people working in the relevant areas, Hum-mPLoc has been used to identify all human protein entries in the Swiss-Prot database that do not have subcellular location annotations or are annotated as being uncertain. The large-scale results thus obtained have been deposited in a downloadable file prepared with Microsoft Excel and named "Tab_Hum-mPLoc.xls". This file is available at the same website and will be updated twice a year to include new entries of human proteins and reflect the continuous development of Hum-mPLoc.     

Improving subcellular localization prediction using text classification and the gene ontology

MOTIVATION: Each protein performs its functions within some specific locations in a cell. This subcellular location is important for understanding protein function and for facilitating its purification. There are now many computational techniques for predicting location based on sequence analysis and database information from homologs. A few recent techniques use text from biological abstracts: our goal is to improve the prediction accuracy of such text-based techniques. We identify three techniques for improving text-based prediction: a rule for ambiguous abstract removal, a mechanism for using synonyms from the Gene Ontology (GO) and a mechanism for using the GO hierarchy to generalize terms. We show that these three techniques can significantly improve the accuracy of protein subcellular location predictors that use text extracted from PubMed abstracts whose references are recorded in Swiss-Prot.     

Prediction of subcellular location apoptosis proteins with ensemble classifier and feature selection

Apoptosis proteins have a central role in the development and the homeostasis of an organism. These proteins are very important for understanding the mechanism of programmed cell death. The function of an apoptosis protein is closely related to its subcellular location. It is crucial to develop powerful tools to predict apoptosis protein locations for rapidly increasing gap between the number of known structural proteins and the number of known sequences in protein databank. In this study, amino acids pair compositions with different spaces are used to construct feature sets for representing sample of protein feature selection approach based on binary particle swarm optimization, which is applied to extract effective feature. Ensemble classifier is used as prediction engine, of which the basic classifier is the fuzzy K-nearest neighbor. Each basic classifier is trained with different feature sets. Two datasets often used in prior works are selected to validate the performance of proposed approach. The results obtained by jackknife test are quite encouraging, indicating that the proposed method might become a potentially useful tool for subcellular location of apoptosis protein, or at least can play a complimentary role to the existing methods in the relevant areas. The supplement information and software written in Matlab are available by contacting the corresponding author.     

Predicting protein subcellular location using Chou's pseudo amino acid composition and improved hybrid approach

The location of a protein in a cell is closely correlated with its biological function. Based on the concept that the protein subcellular location is mainly determined by its amino acid and pseudo amino acid composition (PseAA), a new algorithm of increment of diversity combined with support vector machine is proposed to predict the protein subcellular location. The subcellular locations of plant and non-plant proteins are investigated by our method. The overall prediction accuracies in jackknife test are 88.3% for the eukaryotic plant proteins and 92.4% for the eukaryotic non-plant proteins, respectively. In order to estimate the effect of the sequence identity on predictive result, the proteins with sequence identity 相似文献   

Predicting protein subnuclear location with optimized evidence-theoretic K-nearest classifier and pseudo amino acid composition

The nucleus is the brain of eukaryotic cells that guides the life processes of the cell by issuing key instructions. For in-depth understanding of the biochemical process of the nucleus, the knowledge of localization of nuclear proteins is very important. With the avalanche of protein sequences generated in the post-genomic era, it is highly desired to develop an automated method for fast annotating the subnuclear locations for numerous newly found nuclear protein sequences so as to be able to timely utilize them for basic research and drug discovery. In view of this, a novel approach is developed for predicting the protein subnuclear location. It is featured by introducing a powerful classifier, the optimized evidence-theoretic K-nearest classifier, and using the pseudo amino acid composition [K.C. Chou, PROTEINS: Structure, Function, and Genetics, 43 (2001) 246], which can incorporate a considerable amount of sequence-order effects, to represent protein samples. As a demonstration, identifications were performed for 370 nuclear proteins among the following 9 subnuclear locations: (1) Cajal body, (2) chromatin, (3) heterochromatin, (4) nuclear diffuse, (5) nuclear pore, (6) nuclear speckle, (7) nucleolus, (8) PcG body, and (9) PML body. The overall success rates thus obtained by both the re-substitution test and jackknife cross-validation test are significantly higher than those by existing classifiers on the same working dataset. It is anticipated that the powerful approach may also become a useful high throughput vehicle to bridge the huge gap occurring in the post-genomic era between the number of gene sequences in databases and the number of gene products that have been functionally characterized. The OET-KNN classifier will be available at www.pami.sjtu.edu.cn/people/hbshen.     

An evolution based classifier for prediction of protein interfaces without using protein structures

MOTIVATION: The number of available protein structures still lags far behind the number of known protein sequences. This makes it important to predict which residues participate in protein-protein interactions using only sequence information. Few studies have tackled this problem until now. RESULTS: We applied support vector machines to sequences in order to generate a classification of all protein residues into those that are part of a protein interface and those that are not. For the first time evolutionary information was used as one of the attributes and this inclusion of evolutionary importance rankings improves the classification. Leave-one-out cross-validation experiments show that prediction accuracy reaches 64%.     

Using pseudo amino acid composition to predict protein subcellular location: approached with amino acid composition distribution

In the Post Genome Age, there is an urgent need to develop the reliable and effective computational methods to predict the subcellular localization for the explosion of newly found proteins. Here, a novel method of pseudo amino acid (PseAA) composition, the so-called “amino acid composition distribution” (AACD), is introduced. First, a protein sequence is divided equally into multiple segments. Then, amino acid composition of each segment is calculated in series. After that, each protein sequence can be represented by a feature vector. Finally, the feature vectors of all sequences thus obtained are further input into the multi-class support vector machines to predict the subcellular localization. The results show that AACD is quite effective in representing protein sequences for the purpose of predicting protein subcellular localization.     

Using cellular automata images and pseudo amino acid composition to predict protein subcellular location

Summary. The avalanche of newly found protein sequences in the post-genomic era has motivated and challenged us to develop an automated method that can rapidly and accurately predict the localization of an uncharacterized protein in cells because the knowledge thus obtained can greatly speed up the process in finding its biological functions. However, it is very difficult to establish such a desired predictor by acquiring the key statistical information buried in a pile of extremely complicated and highly variable sequences. In this paper, based on the concept of the pseudo amino acid composition (Chou, K. C. PROTEINS: Structure, Function, and Genetics, 2001, 43: 246–255), the approach of cellular automata image is introduced to cope with this problem. Many important features, which are originally hidden in the long amino acid sequences, can be clearly displayed through their cellular automata images. One of the remarkable merits by doing so is that many image recognition tools can be straightforwardly applied to the target aimed here. High success rates were observed through the self-consistency, jackknife, and independent dataset tests, respectively.     

mPLR-Loc: An adaptive decision multi-label classifier based on penalized logistic regression for protein subcellular localization prediction

Proteins located in appropriate cellular compartments are of paramount importance to exert their biological functions. Prediction of protein subcellular localization by computational methods is required in the post-genomic era. Recent studies have been focusing on predicting not only single-location proteins but also multi-location proteins. However, most of the existing predictors are far from effective for tackling the challenges of multi-label proteins. This article proposes an efficient multi-label predictor, namely mPLR-Loc, based on penalized logistic regression and adaptive decisions for predicting both single- and multi-location proteins. Specifically, for each query protein, mPLR-Loc exploits the information from the Gene Ontology (GO) database by using its accession number (AC) or the ACs of its homologs obtained via BLAST. The frequencies of GO occurrences are used to construct feature vectors, which are then classified by an adaptive decision-based multi-label penalized logistic regression classifier. Experimental results based on two recent stringent benchmark datasets (virus and plant) show that mPLR-Loc remarkably outperforms existing state-of-the-art multi-label predictors. In addition to being able to rapidly and accurately predict subcellular localization of single- and multi-label proteins, mPLR-Loc can also provide probabilistic confidence scores for the prediction decisions. For readers’ convenience, the mPLR-Loc server is available online (http://bioinfo.eie.polyu.edu.hk/mPLRLocServer).     

MultiLoc: prediction of protein subcellular localization using N-terminal targeting sequences, sequence motifs and amino acid composition

MOTIVATION: Functional annotation of unknown proteins is a major goal in proteomics. A key annotation is the prediction of a protein's subcellular localization. Numerous prediction techniques have been developed, typically focusing on a single underlying biological aspect or predicting a subset of all possible localizations. An important step is taken towards emulating the protein sorting process by capturing and bringing together biologically relevant information, and addressing the clear need to improve prediction accuracy and localization coverage. RESULTS: Here we present a novel SVM-based approach for predicting subcellular localization, which integrates N-terminal targeting sequences, amino acid composition and protein sequence motifs. We show how this approach improves the prediction based on N-terminal targeting sequences, by comparing our method TargetLoc against existing methods. Furthermore, MultiLoc performs considerably better than comparable methods predicting all major eukaryotic subcellular localizations, and shows better or comparable results to methods that are specialized on fewer localizations or for one organism. AVAILABILITY: http://www-bs.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/Services/MultiLoc/     

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.     

Application of pseudo amino acid composition for predicting protein subcellular location: stochastic signal processing approach

The function of a protein is closely correlated with its subcellular location. With the success of human genome project and the rapid increase in the number of newly found protein sequences entering into data banks, it is highly desirable to develop an automated method for predicting the subcellular location of proteins. The establishment of such a predictor will no doubt expedite the functionality determination of newly found proteins and the process of prioritizing genes and proteins identified by genomics efforts as potential molecular targets for drug design. Based on the concept of pseudo amino acid composition originally proposed by K. C. Chou (Proteins: Struct. Funct. Genet. 43: 246–255, 2001), the digital signal processing approach has been introduced to partially incorporate the sequence order effect. One of the remarkable merits by doing so is that many existing tools in mathematics and engineering can be straightforwardly used in predicting protein subcellular location. The results thus obtained are quite encouraging. It is anticipated that the digital signal processing may serve as a useful vehicle for many other protein science areas as well.     

Prediction of apoptosis protein subcellular location using improved hybrid approach and pseudo-amino acid composition

Apoptosis proteins are very important for understanding the mechanism of programmed cell death. The apoptosis protein localization can provide valuable information about its molecular function. The prediction of localization of an apoptosis protein is a challenging task. In our previous work we proposed an increment of diversity (ID) method using protein sequence information for this prediction task. In this work, based on the concept of Chou's pseudo-amino acid composition [Chou, K.C., 2001. Prediction of protein cellular attributes using pseudo-amino acid composition. Proteins: Struct. Funct. Genet. (Erratum: Chou, K.C., 2001, vol. 44, 60) 43, 246-255, Chou, K.C., 2005. Using amphiphilic pseudo-amino acid composition to predict enzyme subfamily classes. Bioinformatics 21, 10-19], a different pseudo-amino acid composition by using the hydropathy distribution information is introduced. A novel ID_SVM algorithm combined ID with support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. This method is applied to three data sets (317 apoptosis proteins, 225 apoptosis proteins and 98 apoptosis proteins). The higher predictive success rates than the previous algorithms are obtained by the jackknife tests.     

Protein location prediction using atomic composition and global features of the amino acid sequence

Subcellular location of protein is constructive information in determining its function, screening for drug candidates, vaccine design, annotation of gene products and in selecting relevant proteins for further studies. Computational prediction of subcellular localization deals with predicting the location of a protein from its amino acid sequence. For a computational localization prediction method to be more accurate, it should exploit all possible relevant biological features that contribute to the subcellular localization. In this work, we extracted the biological features from the full length protein sequence to incorporate more biological information. A new biological feature, distribution of atomic composition is effectively used with, multiple physiochemical properties, amino acid composition, three part amino acid composition, and sequence similarity for predicting the subcellular location of the protein. Support Vector Machines are designed for four modules and prediction is made by a weighted voting system. Our system makes prediction with an accuracy of 100, 82.47, 88.81 for self-consistency test, jackknife test and independent data test respectively. Our results provide evidence that the prediction based on the biological features derived from the full length amino acid sequence gives better accuracy than those derived from N-terminal alone. Considering the features as a distribution within the entire sequence will bring out underlying property distribution to a greater detail to enhance the prediction accuracy.     

Using functional domain composition and support vector machines for prediction of protein subcellular location

Proteins are generally classified into the following 12 subcellular locations: 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. Because the function of a protein is closely correlated with its subcellular location, with the rapid increase in new protein sequences entering into databanks, it is vitally important for both basic research and pharmaceutical industry to establish a high throughput tool for predicting protein subcellular location. In this paper, a new concept, the so-called "functional domain composition" is introduced. Based on the novel concept, the representation for a protein can be defined as a vector in a high-dimensional space, where each of the clustered functional domains derived from the protein universe serves as a vector base. With such a novel representation for a protein, the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm is introduced for predicting protein subcellular location. High success rates are obtained by the self-consistency test, jackknife test, and independent dataset test, respectively. The current approach not only can play an important complementary role to the powerful covariant discriminant algorithm based on the pseudo amino acid composition representation (Chou, K. C. (2001) Proteins Struct. Funct. Genet. 43, 246-255; Correction (2001) Proteins Struct. Funct. Genet. 44, 60), but also may greatly stimulate the development of this area.     

Predicting protein subcellular location: exploiting amino acid based sequence of feature spaces and fusion of diverse classifiers

A novel approach CE-Ploc is proposed for predicting protein subcellular locations by exploiting diversity both in feature and decision spaces. The diversity in a sequence of feature spaces is exploited using hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity of amphiphilic pseudo amino acid composition and a specific learning mechanism. Diversity in learning mechanisms is exploited by fusion of classifiers that are based on different learning mechanisms. Significant improvement in prediction performance is observed using jackknife and independent dataset tests.