Prediction of Lipid-Binding Sites Based on Support Vector Machine and Position Specific Scoring Matrix

Lipid–protein interactions play a vital role in various biological processes, which are involved in cellular functions and can affect the stability, folding and the function of peptides and proteins. In this study, a sequence-based method by using support vector machine and position specific scoring matrix (PSSM) was proposed to predict lipid-binding sites. Considering the influence of surrounding residues of one amino acid, a sliding window was chosen to encode the PSSM profiles. By incorporating the evolutionary information and the local features of residues surrounding one lipid-binding site, the method yielded a high accuracy of 80.86% and the Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient of 0.58 by using fivefold cross validation test. The good result indicates the applicability of the method.