Dataset Information

Clustering the annotation space of proteins.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Current protein clustering methods rely on either sequence or functional similarities between proteins, thereby limiting inferences to one of these areas. RESULTS: Here we report a new approach, named CLAN, which clusters proteins according to both annotation and sequence similarity. This approach is extremely fast, clustering the complete SwissProt database within minutes. It is also accurate, recovering consistent protein families agreeing on average in more than 97% with sequence-based protein families from Pfam. Discrepancies between sequence- and annotation-based clusters were scrutinized and the reasons reported. We demonstrate examples for each of these cases, and thoroughly discuss an example of a propagated error in SwissProt: a vacuolar ATPase subunit M9.2 erroneously annotated as vacuolar ATP synthase subunit H. CLAN algorithm is available from the authors and the CLAN database is accessible at http://maine.ebi.ac.uk:8000/cgi-bin/clan/ClanSearch.pl CONCLUSIONS: CLAN creates refined function-and-sequence specific protein families that can be used for identification and annotation of unknown family members. It also allows easy identification of erroneous annotations by spotting inconsistencies between similarities on annotation and sequence levels.

SUBMITTER: Kunin V

PROVIDER: S-EPMC552314 | biostudies-literature | 2005

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Clustering the annotation space of proteins.

Kunin Victor V Ouzounis Christos A CA

BMC bioinformatics 20050209

<h4>Background</h4>Current protein clustering methods rely on either sequence or functional similarities between proteins, thereby limiting inferences to one of these areas.<h4>Results</h4>Here we report a new approach, named CLAN, which clusters proteins according to both annotation and sequence similarity. This approach is extremely fast, clustering the complete SwissProt database within minutes. It is also accurate, recovering consistent protein families agreeing on average in more than 97% w ...[more]

PMID: 15703069

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Project description:BackgroundBiological knowledge, and therefore Gene Ontology annotation sets, for human genes is incomplete. Recent studies have reported that biases in available GO annotations result in biased estimates of functional similarities of genes, but it is still unclear what the effect of incompleteness itself may be, even in the absence of bias. Pairwise gene similarities are used in a number of contexts, including gene "functional similarity" clustering and the related problem of functional ontology structure inference, but it is not known how different similarity measures or clustering methods perform on this task, and how the clusters are affected by annotation completeness.ResultsWe developed representations of both "complete" and "incomplete" GO annotation datasets based on experimentally-supported annotations from the GO database-specifically designed to model the incompleteness of human gene annotations-and computed semantic similarities for each set using a variety of different published measures. We then assessed the clusters derived from these measures using two different clustering methods: hierarchical clustering, and the CliXO algorithm. We find the CliXO algorithm, combined with appropriate measures, performs better than hierarchical clustering in reconstructing GO both when the data are complete, and incomplete. Some measures, particularly those that create a pairwise gene similarity by averaging over all pairwise annotation similarities, had consistently poor performance, and a few measures, such as Lin best-matched average and Relevance maximum, were generally among the best performers for a broad range in annotation completeness and types of GO classes. Finally, we show that for semantic similarity-based clustering, the multicellular organism process branch of the GO biological process ontology is more challenging to represent than the cellular process branch.ConclusionsWe assessed the effects of annotation completeness on the distribution of pairwise gene semantic similarity scores, and subsequent effects on the clusters derived from these scores. Our results suggest combinations of semantic similarity measures, gene-level scoring methods and clustering method that perform best for functional gene clustering using annotation sets of varying completeness. Overall, our results underscore the importance of increasing the completeness of GO annotations to for supporting computational analyses of gene function.

Dataset Information

Clustering the annotation space of proteins.

Publications

Clustering the annotation space of proteins.

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