Evolutionary Information In Form Research Articles

Combining Evolutionary Information and an Iterative Sampling Strategy for Accurate Protein Structure Prediction.

Recent work has shown that the accuracy of ab initio structure prediction can be significantly improved by integrating evolutionary information in form of intra-protein residue-residue contacts. Following this seminal result, much effort is put into the improvement of contact predictions. However, there is also a substantial need to develop structure prediction protocols tailored to the type of restraints gained by contact predictions. Here, we present a structure prediction protocol that combines evolutionary information with the resolution-adapted structural recombination approach of Rosetta, called RASREC. Compared to the classic Rosetta ab initio protocol, RASREC achieves improved sampling, better convergence and higher robustness against incorrect distance restraints, making it the ideal sampling strategy for the stated problem. To demonstrate the accuracy of our protocol, we tested the approach on a diverse set of 28 globular proteins. Our method is able to converge for 26 out of the 28 targets and improves the average TM-score of the entire benchmark set from 0.55 to 0.72 when compared to the top ranked models obtained by the EVFold web server using identical contact predictions. Using a smaller benchmark, we furthermore show that the prediction accuracy of our method is only slightly reduced when the contact prediction accuracy is comparatively low. This observation is of special interest for protein sequences that only have a limited number of homologs.

SVM based prediction of RNA‐binding proteins using binding residues and evolutionary information

RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play crucial role in transcription and gene-regulation. This paper describes a support vector machine (SVM) based method for discriminating and classifying RNA-binding and non-binding proteins using sequence features. With the threshold of 30% interacting residues, RNA-binding amino acid prediction method PPRINT achieved the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.32. BLAST and PSI-BLAST identified RBPs with the coverage of 32.63 and 33.16%, respectively, at the e-value of 1e-4. The SVM models developed with amino acid, dipeptide and four-part amino acid compositions showed the MCC of 0.60, 0.46, and 0.53, respectively. This is the first study in which evolutionary information in form of position specific scoring matrix (PSSM) profile has been successfully used for predicting RBPs. We achieved the maximum MCC of 0.62 using SVM model based on PSSM called PSSM-400. Finally, we developed different hybrid approaches and achieved maximum MCC of 0.66. We also developed a method for predicting three subclasses of RNA binding proteins (e.g., rRNA, tRNA, mRNA binding proteins). The performance of the method was also evaluated on an independent dataset of 69 RBPs and 100 non-RBPs (NBPs). An additional benchmarking was also performed using gene ontology (GO) based annotation. Based on the hybrid approach a web-server RNApred has been developed for predicting RNA binding proteins from amino acid sequences (http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/rnapred/).

Identification of DNA-binding proteins using support vector machines and evolutionary profiles.

BackgroundIdentification of DNA-binding proteins is one of the major challenges in the field of genome annotation, as these proteins play a crucial role in gene-regulation. In this paper, we developed various SVM modules for predicting DNA-binding domains and proteins. All models were trained and tested on multiple datasets of non-redundant proteins.ResultsSVM models have been developed on DNAaset, which consists of 1153 DNA-binding and equal number of non DNA-binding proteins, and achieved the maximum accuracy of 72.42% and 71.59% using amino acid and dipeptide compositions, respectively. The performance of SVM model improved from 72.42% to 74.22%, when evolutionary information in form of PSSM profiles was used as input instead of amino acid composition. In addition, SVM models have been developed on DNAset, which consists of 146 DNA-binding and 250 non-binding chains/domains, and achieved the maximum accuracy of 79.80% and 86.62% using amino acid composition and PSSM profiles. The SVM models developed in this study perform better than existing methods on a blind dataset.ConclusionA highly accurate method has been developed for predicting DNA-binding proteins using SVM and PSSM profiles. This is the first study in which evolutionary information in form of PSSM profiles has been used successfully for predicting DNA-binding proteins. A web-server DNAbinder has been developed for identifying DNA-binding proteins and domains from query amino acid sequences .