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Structure- and sequence-based function prediction for non-homologous proteins.

ABSTRACT: The structural genomics projects have been accumulating an increasing number of protein structures, many of which remain functionally unknown. In parallel effort to experimental methods, computational methods are expected to make a significant contribution for functional elucidation of such proteins. However, conventional computational methods that transfer functions from homologous proteins do not help much for these uncharacterized protein structures because they do not have apparent structural or sequence similarity with the known proteins. Here, we briefly review two avenues of computational function prediction methods, i.e. structure-based methods and sequence-based methods. The focus is on our recent developments of local structure-based and sequence-based methods, which can effectively extract function information from distantly related proteins. Two structure-based methods, Pocket-Surfer and Patch-Surfer, identify similar known ligand binding sites for pocket regions in a query protein without using global protein fold similarity information. Two sequence-based methods, protein function prediction and extended similarity group, make use of weakly similar sequences that are conventionally discarded in homology based function annotation. Combined together with experimental methods we hope that computational methods will make leading contribution in functional elucidation of the protein structures.

SUBMITTER: Sael L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3375349 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Structure- and sequence-based function prediction for non-homologous proteins.

Sael Lee L Chitale Meghana M Kihara Daisuke D

Journal of structural and functional genomics 20120122 2

The structural genomics projects have been accumulating an increasing number of protein structures, many of which remain functionally unknown. In parallel effort to experimental methods, computational methods are expected to make a significant contribution for functional elucidation of such proteins. However, conventional computational methods that transfer functions from homologous proteins do not help much for these uncharacterized protein structures because they do not have apparent structura ...[more]

PMID: 22270458

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Project description:BackgroundReliable prediction of stability changes induced by a single amino acid substitution is an important aspect of computational protein design. Several machine learning methods capable of predicting stability changes from the protein sequence alone have been introduced. Prediction performance of these methods is evaluated on mutations unseen during training. Nevertheless, different mutations of the same protein, and even the same residue, as encountered during training are commonly used for evaluation. We argue that a faithful evaluation can be achieved only when a method is tested on previously unseen proteins with low sequence similarity to the training set.ResultsWe provided experimental evidence of the limitations of the evaluation commonly used for assessing the prediction performance. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the prediction of stability changes in previously unseen non-homologous proteins is a challenging task for currently available methods. To improve the prediction performance of our previously proposed method, we identified features which led to over-fitting and further extended the model with new features. The new method employs Evolutionary And Structural Encodings with Amino Acid parameters (EASE-AA). Evaluated with an independent test set of more than 600 mutations, EASE-AA yielded a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.36 and was able to classify correctly 66% of the stabilising and 74% of the destabilising mutations. For real-value prediction, EASE-AA achieved the correlation of predicted and experimentally measured stability changes of 0.51.ConclusionsCommonly adopted evaluation with mutations in the same protein, and even the same residue, randomly divided between the training and test sets lead to an overestimation of prediction performance. Therefore, stability changes prediction methods should be evaluated only on mutations in previously unseen non-homologous proteins. Under such an evaluation, EASE-AA predicts stability changes more reliably than currently available methods.

Project description:The type III secretion system (TTSS) is a key mechanism for host cell interaction used by a variety of bacterial pathogens and symbionts of plants and animals including humans. The TTSS represents a molecular syringe with which the bacteria deliver effector proteins directly into the host cell cytosol. Despite the importance of the TTSS for bacterial pathogenesis, recognition and targeting of type III secreted proteins has up until now been poorly understood. Several hypotheses are discussed, including an mRNA-based signal, a chaperon-mediated process, or an N-terminal signal peptide. In this study, we systematically analyzed the amino acid composition and secondary structure of N-termini of 100 experimentally verified effector proteins. Based on this, we developed a machine-learning approach for the prediction of TTSS effector proteins, taking into account N-terminal sequence features such as frequencies of amino acids, short peptides, or residues with certain physico-chemical properties. The resulting computational model revealed a strong type III secretion signal in the N-terminus that can be used to detect effectors with sensitivity of approximately 71% and selectivity of approximately 85%. This signal seems to be taxonomically universal and conserved among animal pathogens and plant symbionts, since we could successfully detect effector proteins if the respective group was excluded from training. The application of our prediction approach to 739 complete bacterial and archaeal genome sequences resulted in the identification of between 0% and 12% putative TTSS effector proteins. Comparison of effector proteins with orthologs that are not secreted by the TTSS showed no clear pattern of signal acquisition by fusion, suggesting convergent evolutionary processes shaping the type III secretion signal. The newly developed program EffectiveT3 (http://www.chlamydiaedb.org) is the first universal in silico prediction program for the identification of novel TTSS effectors. Our findings will facilitate further studies on and improve our understanding of type III secretion and its role in pathogen-host interactions.

Dataset Information

Structure- and sequence-based function prediction for non-homologous proteins.

Publications

Structure- and sequence-based function prediction for non-homologous proteins.

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