A two-layered machine learning method to identify protein O-GlcNAcylation sites with O-GlcNAc transferase substrate motifs

BMC Bioinformatics. 2015;16 Suppl 18(Suppl 18):S10. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-16-S18-S10. Epub 2015 Dec 9.

Abstract

Protein O-GlcNAcylation, involving the β-attachment of single N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) to the hydroxyl group of serine or threonine residues, is an O-linked glycosylation catalyzed by O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT). Molecular level investigation of the basis for OGT's substrate specificity should aid understanding how O-GlcNAc contributes to diverse cellular processes. Due to an increasing number of O-GlcNAcylated peptides with site-specific information identified by mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics, we were motivated to characterize substrate site motifs of O-GlcNAc transferases. In this investigation, a non-redundant dataset of 410 experimentally verified O-GlcNAcylation sites were manually extracted from dbOGAP, OGlycBase and UniProtKB. After detection of conserved motifs by using maximal dependence decomposition, profile hidden Markov model (profile HMM) was adopted to learn a first-layered model for each identified OGT substrate motif. Support Vector Machine (SVM) was then used to generate a second-layered model learned from the output values of profile HMMs in first layer. The two-layered predictive model was evaluated using a five-fold cross validation which yielded a sensitivity of 85.4%, a specificity of 84.1%, and an accuracy of 84.7%. Additionally, an independent testing set from PhosphoSitePlus, which was really non-homologous to the training data of predictive model, was used to demonstrate that the proposed method could provide a promising accuracy (84.05%) and outperform other O-GlcNAcylation site prediction tools. A case study indicated that the proposed method could be a feasible means of conducting preliminary analyses of protein O-GlcNAcylation and has been implemented as a web-based system, OGTSite, which is now freely available at http://csb.cse.yzu.edu.tw/OGTSite/.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acetylglucosamine / metabolism
  • Algorithms
  • Amino Acid Motifs
  • Glycosylation
  • Internet
  • Machine Learning*
  • Mass Spectrometry
  • N-Acetylglucosaminyltransferases / metabolism*
  • Peptides / analysis
  • Peptides / metabolism
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Proteins / metabolism
  • Substrate Specificity
  • Support Vector Machine
  • User-Computer Interface

Substances

  • Peptides
  • Proteins
  • N-Acetylglucosaminyltransferases
  • O-GlcNAc transferase
  • Acetylglucosamine