More Like this

1. HybridDBRpred: improved sequence-based prediction of DNA-binding amino acids using annotations from structured complexes and disordered proteins

   https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad1131  

   Zhang, Jian ; Basu, Sushmita ; Kurgan, Lukasz ( December 2023 , Nucleic Acids Research)

   Current predictors of DNA-binding residues (DBRs) from protein sequences belong to two distinct groups, those trained on binding annotations extracted from structured protein-DNA complexes (structure-trained) vs. intrinsically disordered proteins (disorder-trained). We complete the first empirical analysis of predictive performance across the structure- and disorder-annotated proteins for a representative collection of ten predictors. Majority of the structure-trained tools perform well on the structure-annotated proteins while doing relatively poorly on the disorder-annotated proteins, and vice versa. Several methods make accurate predictions for the structure-annotated proteins or the disorder-annotated proteins, but none performs highly accurately for both annotation types. Moreover, most predictors make excessive cross-predictions for the disorder-annotated proteins, where residues that interact with non-DNA ligand types are predicted as DBRs. Motivated by these results, we design, validate and deploy an innovative meta-model, hybridDBRpred, that uses deep transformer network to combine predictions generated by three best current predictors. HybridDBRpred provides accurate predictions and low levels of cross-predictions across the two annotation types, and is statistically more accurate than each of the ten tools and baseline meta-predictors that rely on averaging and logistic regression. We deploy hybridDBRpred as a convenient web server at http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/hybridDBRpred/ and provide the corresponding source code at https://github.com/jianzhang-xynu/hybridDBRpred.

    

   more » « less
2. CLIP: accurate prediction of disordered linear interacting peptides from protein sequences using co-evolutionary information

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac502  

   Peng, Zhenling ; Li, Zixia ; Meng, Qiaozhen ; Zhao, Bi ; Kurgan, Lukasz ( December 2022 , Briefings in Bioinformatics)

   One of key features of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) is facilitation of protein–protein and protein–nucleic acids interactions. These disordered binding regions include molecular recognition features (MoRFs), short linear motifs (SLiMs) and longer binding domains. Vast majority of current predictors of disordered binding regions target MoRFs, with a handful of methods that predict SLiMs and disordered protein-binding domains. A new and broader class of disordered binding regions, linear interacting peptides (LIPs), was introduced recently and applied in the MobiDB resource. LIPs are segments in protein sequences that undergo disorder-to-order transition upon binding to a protein or a nucleic acid, and they cover MoRFs, SLiMs and disordered protein-binding domains. Although current predictors of MoRFs and disordered protein-binding regions could be used to identify some LIPs, there are no dedicated sequence-based predictors of LIPs. To this end, we introduce CLIP, a new predictor of LIPs that utilizes robust logistic regression model to combine three complementary types of inputs: co-evolutionary information derived from multiple sequence alignments, physicochemical profiles and disorder predictions. Ablation analysis suggests that the co-evolutionary information is particularly useful for this prediction and that combining the three inputs provides substantial improvements when compared to using these inputs individually. Comparative empirical assessments using low-similarity test datasets reveal that CLIP secures area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.8 and substantially improves over the results produced by the closest current tools that predict MoRFs and disordered protein-binding regions. The webserver of CLIP is freely available at http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/CLIP/ and the standalone code can be downloaded from http://yanglab.qd.sdu.edu.cn/download/CLIP/.

    

   more » « less
3. AUCpreD: proteome-level protein disorder prediction by AUC-maximized deep convolutional neural fields

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btw446  

   Wang, Sheng ; Ma, Jianzhu ; Xu, Jinbo ( August 2016 , Bioinformatics)

   Protein intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) play an important role in many biological processes. Two key properties of IDRs are (i) the occurrence is proteome-wide and (ii) the ratio of disordered residues is about 6%, which makes it challenging to accurately predict IDRs. Most IDR prediction methods use sequence profile to improve accuracy, which prevents its application to proteome-wide prediction since it is time-consuming to generate sequence profiles. On the other hand, the methods without using sequence profile fare much worse than using sequence profile.

   This article formulates IDR prediction as a sequence labeling problem and employs a new machine learning method called Deep Convolutional Neural Fields (DeepCNF) to solve it. DeepCNF is an integration of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) and conditional random fields (CRF); it can model not only complex sequence–structure relationship in a hierarchical manner, but also correlation among adjacent residues. To deal with highly imbalanced order/disorder ratio, instead of training DeepCNF by widely used maximum-likelihood, we develop a novel approach to train it by maximizing area under the ROC curve (AUC), which is an unbiased measure for class-imbalanced data.

   Our experimental results show that our IDR prediction method AUCpreD outperforms existing popular disorder predictors. More importantly, AUCpreD works very well even without sequence profile, comparing favorably to or even outperforming many methods using sequence profile. Therefore, our method works for proteome-wide disorder prediction while yielding similar or better accuracy than the others.

   http://raptorx2.uchicago.edu/StructurePropertyPred/predict/

   wangsheng@uchicago.edu, jinboxu@gmail.com

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

   more » « less
4. DISOselect: Disorder predictor selection at the protein level

   https://doi.org/10.1002/pro.3756  

   Katuwawala, Akila ; Oldfield, Christopher J. ; Kurgan, Lukasz ( November 2019 , Protein Science)

   The intense interest in the intrinsically disordered proteins in the life science community, together with the remarkable advancements in predictive technologies, have given rise to the development of a large number of computational predictors of intrinsic disorder from protein sequence. While the growing number of predictors is a positive trend, we have observed a considerable difference in predictive quality among predictors for individual proteins. Furthermore, variable predictor performance is often inconsistent between predictors for different proteins, and the predictor that shows the best predictive performance depends on the unique properties of each protein sequence. We propose a computational approach, DISOselect, to estimate the predictive performance of 12 selected predictors for individual proteins based on their unique sequence‐derived properties. This estimation informs the users about the expected predictive quality for a selected disorder predictor and can be used to recommend methods that are likely to provide the best quality predictions. Our solution does not depend on the results of any disorder predictor; the estimations are made based solely on the protein sequence. Our solution significantly improves predictive performance, as judged with a test set of 1,000 proteins, when compared to other alternatives. We have empirically shown that by using the recommended methods the overall predictive performance for a given set of proteins can be improved by a statistically significant margin. DISOselect is freely available for non‐commercial users through the webserver athttp://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/DISOselect/.

    

   more » « less
5. High‐throughput prediction of disordered moonlighting regions in protein sequences

   https://doi.org/10.1002/prot.25590  

   Meng, Fanchi ; Kurgan, Lukasz ( September 2018 , Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics)

   Intrinsically disordered regions lack stable structure in their native conformation but are nevertheless functional and highly abundant, particularly in Eukaryotes. Disordered moonlighting regions (DMRs) are intrinsically disordered regions that carry out multiple functions. DMRs are different from moonlighting proteins that could be structured and that are annotated at the whole‐protein level. DMRs cannot be identified by current predictors of functions of disorder that focus on specific functions rather than multifunctional regions. We conceptualized, designed and empirically assessed first‐of‐its‐kind sequence‐based predictor of DMRs, DMRpred. This computational tool outputs propensity for being in a DMR for each residue in an input protein sequence. We developed novel amino acid indices that quantify propensities for functions relevant to DMRs and used evolutionary conservation, putative solvent accessibility and intrinsic disorder derived from the input sequence to build a rich profile that is suitable to accurately predict DMRs. We processed this profile to derive innovative features that we input into a Random Forest model to generate the predictions. Empirical assessment shows that DMRpred generates accurate predictions with area under receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.86 and accuracy = 82%. These results are significantly better than the closest alternative approaches that rely on sequence alignment, evolutionary conservation and putative disorder and disorder functions. Analysis of abundance of putative DMRs in the human proteome reveals that as many as 25% of proteins may have long >30 residues) DMRs. A webserver implementation of DMRpred is available athttp://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/DMRpred/

    

   more » « less