Accurate prediction of protein structural class

PLoS One. 2012;7(6):e37653. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037653. Epub 2012 Jun 19.

Abstract

Because of the increasing gap between the data from sequencing and structural genomics, the accurate prediction of the structural class of a protein domain solely from the primary sequence has remained a challenging problem in structural biology. Traditional sequence-based predictors generally select several sequence features and then feed them directly into a classification program to identify the structural class. The current best sequence-based predictor achieved an overall accuracy of 74.1% when tested on a widely used, non-homologous benchmark dataset 25PDB. In the present work, we built a multiple linear regression (MLR) model to convert the 440-dimensional (440D) sequence feature vector extracted from the Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) of a protein domain to a 4-dimensinal (4D) structural feature vector, which could then be used to predict the four major structural classes. We performed 10-fold cross-validation and jackknife tests of the method on a large non-homologous dataset containing 8,244 domains distributed among the four major classes. The performance of our approach outperformed all of the existing sequence-based methods and had an overall accuracy of 83.1%, which is even higher than the results of those predicted secondary structure-based methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Protein Conformation
  • Protein Structure, Tertiary
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Proteins / classification*

Substances

  • Proteins