iDNA-Prot|dis: identifying DNA-binding proteins by incorporating amino acid distance-pairs and reduced alphabet profile into the general pseudo amino acid composition

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 3;9(9):e106691. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0106691. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Playing crucial roles in various cellular processes, such as recognition of specific nucleotide sequences, regulation of transcription, and regulation of gene expression, DNA-binding proteins are essential ingredients for both eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteomes. With the avalanche of protein sequences generated in the postgenomic age, it is a critical challenge to develop automated methods for accurate and rapidly identifying DNA-binding proteins based on their sequence information alone. Here, a novel predictor, called "iDNA-Prot|dis", was established by incorporating the amino acid distance-pair coupling information and the amino acid reduced alphabet profile into the general pseudo amino acid composition (PseAAC) vector. The former can capture the characteristics of DNA-binding proteins so as to enhance its prediction quality, while the latter can reduce the dimension of PseAAC vector so as to speed up its prediction process. It was observed by the rigorous jackknife and independent dataset tests that the new predictor outperformed the existing predictors for the same purpose. As a user-friendly web-server, iDNA-Prot|dis is accessible to the public at http://bioinformatics.hitsz.edu.cn/iDNA-Prot_dis/. Moreover, for the convenience of the vast majority of experimental scientists, a step-by-step protocol guide is provided on how to use the web-server to get their desired results without the need to follow the complicated mathematic equations that are presented in this paper just for the integrity of its developing process. It is anticipated that the iDNA-Prot|dis predictor may become a useful high throughput tool for large-scale analysis of DNA-binding proteins, or at the very least, play a complementary role to the existing predictors in this regard.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Amino Acid Sequence / genetics*
  • Amino Acids / genetics*
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • DNA-Binding Proteins / genetics*
  • Databases, Protein
  • Internet
  • Nucleic Acid Conformation
  • Software

Substances

  • Amino Acids
  • DNA-Binding Proteins

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61300112), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. S2012040007390), the Scientific Research Innovation Foundation in Harbin Institute of Technology (Project No. HIT.NSRIF.2013103), the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, China (Grant No. IIPL-2012-002), the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.