SemiHS: an iterative semi-supervised approach for predicting protein-protein interaction hot spots

Protein Pept Lett. 2011 Sep;18(9):896-905. doi: 10.2174/092986611796011419.

Abstract

Protein-protein interaction hot spots, as revealed by alanine scanning mutagenesis, make dominant contributions to the free energy of binding. Since mutagenesis experiments are expensive and time-consuming, the development of computational methods to identify hot spots is becoming increasingly important. In this study, by using a new combination of sequence, structure and energy features, we propose an iterative semi-supervised algorithm, SemiHS, to incorporate unlabeled data to improve the accuracy of hot spots prediction when sufficient training data is un-available and to overcome the imbalanced data problem. We evaluate the predictive power of SemiHS on a labeled set of 265 alanine-mutated interface residues in 17 complexes and a large unlabeled set of 2465 interface residues with 10-fold cross validation, and get an AUC score of 0.85, with a sensitivity of 0.70 and a specificity of 0.87, which are better than those of the existing methods. Moreover, we validate the proposed method by an independent test and obtain encouraging results.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Binding Sites
  • Databases, Protein
  • Protein Binding
  • Protein Interaction Mapping / methods*
  • Proteins / metabolism*

Substances

  • Proteins