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Mutual information and variants for protein domain-domain contact prediction.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Predicting protein contacts solely based on sequence information remains a challenging problem, despite the huge amount of sequence data at our disposal. Mutual Information (MI), an information theory measure, has been extensively employed and modified to identify residues within a protein (intra-protein) that are in contact. More recently MI and its variants have also been used in the prediction of contacts between proteins (inter-protein). METHODS: Here we assess the predictive power of MI and variants for domain-domain contact prediction. We test original MI and these variants, which are called MIp, MIc and ZNMI, on 40 domain-domain test cases containing 10,753 sequences. We also propose and evaluate two new versions of MI that consider triangles of residues and the physiochemical properties of the amino acids, respectively. RESULTS: We found that all versions of MI are skewed towards predicting surface residues. Since domain-domain contacts are on the surface of each domain, we considered only surface residues when attempting to predict contacts. Our analysis shows that MIc is the best current MI domain-domain contact predictor. At 20% recall MIc achieved a precision of 44.9% when only surface residues were considered. Our triangle and reduced alphabet variants of MI highlight the delicate trade-off between signal and noise in the use of MI for domain-domain contact prediction. We also examine a specific "successful" case study and demonstrate that here, when considering surface residues, even the most accurate domain-domain contact predictor, MIc, performs no better than random. CONCLUSIONS: All tested variants of MI are skewed towards predicting surface residues. When considering surface residues only, we find MIc to be the best current MI domain-domain contact predictor. Its performance, however, is not as good as a non-MI based contact predictor, i-Patch. Additionally, the intra-protein contact prediction capabilities of MIc outperform its domain-domain contact prediction abilities.

SUBMITTER: Gomes M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3532072 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Mutual information and variants for protein domain-domain contact prediction.

Gomes Mireille M Hamer Rebecca R Reinert Gesine G Deane Charlotte M CM

BMC research notes 20120831

<h4>Background</h4>Predicting protein contacts solely based on sequence information remains a challenging problem, despite the huge amount of sequence data at our disposal. Mutual Information (MI), an information theory measure, has been extensively employed and modified to identify residues within a protein (intra-protein) that are in contact. More recently MI and its variants have also been used in the prediction of contacts between proteins (inter-protein).<h4>Methods</h4>Here we assess the p ...[more]

PMID: 23244412

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Project description:Background. Genome-wide association studies have succeeded in detecting novel common variants which associate with complex diseases. As a result of the fast changes in next generation sequencing technology, a large number of sequencing data are generated, which offers great opportunities to identify rare variants that could explain a larger proportion of missing heritability. Many effective and powerful methods are proposed, although they are usually limited to continuous, dichotomous or ordinal traits. Notice that traits having nominal categorical features are commonly observed in complex diseases, especially in mental disorders, which motivates the incorporation of the characteristics of the categorical trait into association studies with rare and common variants. Methods. We construct two simple and intuitive nonparametric tests, MIT and aMIT, based on mutual information for detecting association between genetic variants in a gene or region and a categorical trait. MIT and aMIT can gauge the difference among the distributions of rare and common variants across a region given every categorical trait value. If there is little association between variants and a categorical trait, MIT or aMIT approximately equals zero. The larger the difference in distributions, the greater values MIT and aMIT have. Therefore, MIT and aMIT have the potential for detecting functional variants. Results.We checked the validity of proposed statistics and compared them to the existing ones through extensive simulation studies with varied combinations of the numbers of variants of rare causal, rare non-causal, common causal, and common non-causal, deleterious and protective, various minor allele frequencies and different levels of linkage disequilibrium. The results show our methods have higher statistical power than conventional ones, including the likelihood based score test, in most cases: (1) there are multiple genetic variants in a gene or region; (2) both protective and deleterious variants are present; (3) there exist rare and common variants; and (4) more than half of the variants are neutral. The proposed tests are applied to the data from Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism, and a competent performance is exhibited therein. Discussion. As a complementary to the existing methods mainly focusing on quantitative traits, this study provides the nonparametric tests MIT and aMIT for detecting variants associated with categorical trait. Furthermore, we plan to investigate the association between rare variants and multiple categorical traits.

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Mutual information and variants for protein domain-domain contact prediction.

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Mutual information and variants for protein domain-domain contact prediction.

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