Gene Ontology Annotations Of Proteins Research Articles

Predicting functions of maize proteins using graph convolutional network

BackgroundMaize (Zea mays ssp. mays L.) is the most widely grown and yield crop in the world, as well as an important model organism for fundamental research of the function of genes. The functions of Maize proteins are annotated using the Gene Ontology (GO), which has more than 40000 terms and organizes GO terms in a direct acyclic graph (DAG). It is a huge challenge to accurately annotate relevant GO terms to a Maize protein from such a large number of candidate GO terms. Some deep learning models have been proposed to predict the protein function, but the effectiveness of these approaches is unsatisfactory. One major reason is that they inadequately utilize the GO hierarchy.ResultsTo use the knowledge encoded in the GO hierarchy, we propose a deep Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based model (DeepGOA) to predict GO annotations of proteins. DeepGOA firstly quantifies the correlations (or edges) between GO terms and updates the edge weights of the DAG by leveraging GO annotations and hierarchy, then learns the semantic representation and latent inter-relations of GO terms in the way by applying GCN on the updated DAG. Meanwhile, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to learn the feature representation of amino acid sequences with respect to the semantic representations. After that, DeepGOA computes the dot product of the two representations, which enable to train the whole network end-to-end coherently. Extensive experiments show that DeepGOA can effectively integrate GO structural information and amino acid information, and then annotates proteins accurately.ConclusionsExperiments on Maize PH207 inbred line and Human protein sequence dataset show that DeepGOA outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning based methods. The ablation study proves that GCN can employ the knowledge of GO and boost the performance. Codes and datasets are available at http://mlda.swu.edu.cn/codes.php?name=DeepGOA.

Proteome Profiles of Head Kidney and Spleen of Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus Mykiss).

The head kidney and spleen are major lymphoid organs of the teleost fish. The authors identify proteome profiles of head kidney and spleen of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) using a shotgun proteomic approach. Gene ontology annotation of proteins is predicted using bioinformatic tools. This study represents detailed proteome profiles of head kidney and spleen of rainbow trout, with a total of 3241 and 2542 proteins identified, respectively. It is found that lymphoid organs are equipped with a variety of functional proteins related to defense, receptor, signal transduction, antioxidant, cytoskeleton, transport, binding, and metabolic processes. The identified proteome profiles will serve as a template for understanding lymphoid organ functions in salmonids and will increase the amount of spectra information of rainbow trout proteins in the public data repository PRIDE. This data can be accessed via ProteomeXchange with identifiers PXD008473 and PXD008478.

HashGO: hashing gene ontology for protein function prediction

Gene ontology (GO) is a standardized and controlled vocabulary of terms that describe the molecular functions, biological roles and cellular locations of proteins. GO terms and GO hierarchy are regularly updated as the accumulated biological knowledge. More than 50,000 terms are included in GO and each protein is annotated with several or dozens of these terms. Therefore, accurately predicting the association between proteins and massive GO terms is rather challenging. To accurately predict the association between massive GO terms and proteins, we proposed a method called Hashing GO for protein function prediction (HashGO in short). HashGO firstly adopts a protein-term association matrix to store available GO annotations of proteins. Then, it tailors a graph hashing method to explore the underlying structure between GO terms and to obtain a series of hash functions to compress the high-dimensional protein-term association matrix into a low-dimensional one. Next, HashGO computes the semantic similarity between proteins based on Hamming distance on that low-dimensional matrix. After that, it predicts missing annotations of a protein based on the annotations of its semantic neighbors. Experimental results on archived GO annotations of two model species (Yeast and Human) show that HashGO not only more accurately predicts functions than other related approaches, but also runs faster than them.

NewGOA: Predicting New GO Annotations of Proteins by Bi-Random Walks on a Hybrid Graph.

A remaining key challenge of modern biology is annotating the functional roles of proteins. Various computational models have been proposed for this challenge. Most of them assume the annotations of annotated proteins are complete. But in fact, many of them are incomplete. We proposed a method called NewGOA to predict new Gene Ontology (GO) annotations for incompletely annotated proteins and for completely un-annotated ones. NewGOA employs a hybrid graph, composed of two types of nodes (proteins and GO terms), to encode interactions between proteins, hierarchical relationships between terms and available annotations of proteins. To account for structural difference between GO terms subgraph and proteins subgraph, NewGOA applies a bi-random walks algorithm, which executes asynchronous random walks on the hybrid graph, to predict new GO annotations of proteins. Experimental study on archived GO annotations of two model species (H. Sapiens and S. cerevisiae) shows that NewGOA can more accurately and efficiently predict new annotations of proteins than other related methods. Experimental results also indicate the bi-random walks can explore and further exploit the structural difference between GO terms subgraph and proteins subgraph. The supplementary files and codes of NewGOA are available at: http://mlda.swu.edu.cn/codes.php?name=NewGOA.

Predicting Protein Function via Semantic Integration of Multiple Networks

Determining the biological functions of proteins is one of the key challenges in the post-genomic era. The rapidly accumulated large volumes of proteomic and genomic data drives to develop computational models for automatically predicting protein function in large scale. Recent approaches focus on integrating multiple heterogeneous data sources and they often get better results than methods that use single data source alone. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate multiple biological data sources with the biological knowledge, i.e., Gene Ontology (GO), for protein function prediction. We propose a method, called SimNet, to Semantically integrate multiple functional association Networks derived from heterogenous data sources. SimNet firstly utilizes GO annotations of proteins to capture the semantic similarity between proteins and introduces a semantic kernel based on the similarity. Next, SimNet constructs a composite network, obtained as a weighted summation of individual networks, and aligns the network with the kernel to get the weights assigned to individual networks. Then, it applies a network-based classifier on the composite network to predict protein function. Experiment results on heterogenous proteomic data sources of Yeast, Human, Mouse, and Fly show that, SimNet not only achieves better (or comparable) results than other related competitive approaches, but also takes much less time. The Matlab codes of SimNet are available at https://sites.google.com/site/guoxian85/simnet.

GONUTS: the Gene Ontology Normal Usage Tracking System

The Gene Ontology Normal Usage Tracking System (GONUTS) is a community-based browser and usage guide for Gene Ontology (GO) terms and a community system for general GO annotation of proteins. GONUTS uses wiki technology to allow registered users to share and edit notes on the use of each term in GO, and to contribute annotations for specific genes of interest. By providing a site for generation of third-party documentation at the granularity of individual terms, GONUTS complements the official documentation of the Gene Ontology Consortium. To provide examples for community users, GONUTS displays the complete GO annotations from seven model organisms: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Dictyostelium discoideum, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Danio rerio, Mus musculus and Arabidopsis thaliana. To support community annotation, GONUTS allows automated creation of gene pages for gene products in UniProt. GONUTS will improve the consistency of annotation efforts across genome projects, and should be useful in training new annotators and consumers in the production of GO annotations and the use of GO terms. GONUTS can be accessed at http://gowiki.tamu.edu. The source code for generating the content of GONUTS is available upon request.

EBIMed—text crunching to gather facts for proteins from Medline

To allow efficient and systematic retrieval of statements from Medline we have developed EBIMed, a service that combines document retrieval with co-occurrence-based analysis of Medline abstracts. Upon keyword query, EBIMed retrieves the abstracts from EMBL-EBI's installation of Medline and filters for sentences that contain biomedical terminology maintained in public bioinformatics resources. The extracted sentences and terminology are used to generate an overview table on proteins, Gene Ontology (GO) annotations, drugs and species used in the same biological context. All terms in retrieved abstracts and extracted sentences are linked to their entries in biomedical databases. We assessed the quality of the identification of terms and relations in the retrieved sentences. More than 90% of the protein names found indeed represented a protein. According to the analysis of four protein-protein pairs from the Wnt pathway we estimated that 37% of the statements containing such a pair mentioned a meaningful interaction and clarified the interaction of Dkk with LRP. We conclude that EBIMed improves access to information where proteins and drugs are involved in the same biological process, e.g. statements with GO annotations of proteins, protein-protein interactions and effects of drugs on proteins. Available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Rebholz-srv/ebimed

Annotating proteins by mining protein interaction networks

In general, most accurate gene/protein annotations are provided by curators. Despite having lesser evidence strengths, it is inevitable to use computational methods for fast and a priori discovery of protein function annotations. This paper considers the problem of assigning Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to partially annotated or newly discovered proteins. We present a data mining technique that computes the probabilistic relationships between GO annotations of proteins on protein-protein interaction data, and assigns highly correlated GO terms of annotated proteins to non-annotated proteins in the target set. In comparison with other techniques, probabilistic suffix tree and correlation mining techniques produce the highest prediction accuracy of 81% precision with the recall at 45%. Code is available upon request. Results and used materials are available online at http://kirac.case.edu/PROTAN.