Improved detection of DNA-binding proteins via compression technology on PSSM information

PLoS One. 2017 Sep 29;12(9):e0185587. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185587. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Since the importance of DNA-binding proteins in multiple biomolecular functions has been recognized, an increasing number of researchers are attempting to identify DNA-binding proteins. In recent years, the machine learning methods have become more and more compelling in the case of protein sequence data soaring, because of their favorable speed and accuracy. In this paper, we extract three features from the protein sequence, namely NMBAC (Normalized Moreau-Broto Autocorrelation), PSSM-DWT (Position-specific scoring matrix-Discrete Wavelet Transform), and PSSM-DCT (Position-specific scoring matrix-Discrete Cosine Transform). We also employ feature selection algorithm on these feature vectors. Then, these features are fed into the training SVM (support vector machine) model as classifier to predict DNA-binding proteins. Our method applys three datasets, namely PDB1075, PDB594 and PDB186, to evaluate the performance of our approach. The PDB1075 and PDB594 datasets are employed for Jackknife test and the PDB186 dataset is used for the independent test. Our method achieves the best accuracy in the Jacknife test, from 79.20% to 86.23% and 80.5% to 86.20% on PDB1075 and PDB594 datasets, respectively. In the independent test, the accuracy of our method comes to 76.3%. The performance of independent test also shows that our method has a certain ability to be effectively used for DNA-binding protein prediction. The data and source code are at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5104084.

MeSH terms

  • DNA-Binding Proteins / analysis
  • DNA-Binding Proteins / metabolism*
  • Position-Specific Scoring Matrices*
  • Support Vector Machine
  • Wavelet Analysis

Substances

  • DNA-Binding Proteins

Grants and funding

This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC 61772362 and 61402326 to FG), Peiyang Scholar Program of Tianjin University (no. 2016XRG-0009 to FG), and the Tianjin Research Program of Application Foundation and Advanced Technology (16JCQNJC00200 to FG).