77,444 research outputs found
Bayesian Nonparametric Methods for Protein Structure Prediction
The protein structure prediction problem consists of determining a protein’s three-dimensional
structure from the underlying sequence of amino acids. A standard approach for predicting
such structures is to conduct a stochastic search of conformation space in an attempt to find
a conformation that optimizes a scoring function. For one subclass of prediction protocols,
called template-based modeling, a new protein is suspected to be structurally similar to
other proteins with known structure. The solved related proteins may be used to guide the
search of protein structure space.
There are many potential applications for statistics in this area, ranging from the development
of structure scores to improving search algorithms. This dissertation focuses on
strategies for improving structure predictions by incorporating information about closely
related “template” protein structures into searches of protein conformation space. This is
accomplished by generating density estimates on conformation space via various simplifications
of structure models. By concentrating a search for good structure conformations
in areas that are inhabited by similar proteins, we improve the efficiency of our search and
increase the chances of finding a low-energy structure.
In the course of addressing this structural biology problem, we present a number of advances to the field of Bayesian nonparametric density estimation. We first develop a
method for density estimation with bivariate angular data that has applications to characterizing
protein backbone conformation space. We then extend this model to account for
multiple angle pairs, thereby addressing the problem of modeling protein regions instead
of single sequence positions. In the course of this analysis we incorporate an informative
prior into our nonparametric density estimate and find that this significantly improves performance
for protein loop prediction. The final piece of our structure prediction strategy is
to connect side-chain locations to our torsion angle representation of the protein backbone.
We accomplish this by using a Bayesian nonparametric model for dependence that can link
together two or more multivariate marginals distributions. In addition to its application for
our angular-linear data distribution, this dependence model can serve as an alternative to
nonparametric copula methods
Efficient search and comparison algorithms for 3D protein binding site retrieval and structure alignment from large-scale databases
Finding similar 3D structures is crucial for discovering potential structural, evolutionary, and functional relationships among proteins. As the number of known protein structures has dramatically increased, traditional methods can no longer provide the life science community with the adequate informatics capability needed to conduct large-scale and complex analyses. A suite of high-throughput and accurate protein structure search and comparison methods is essential. To meet the needs of the community, we develop several bioinformatics methods for protein binding site comparison and global structure alignment. First, we developed an efficient protein binding site search that is based on extracting geometric features both locally and globally. The main idea of this work was to capture spatial relationships among landmarks of binding site surfaces and bfuild a vocabulary of visual words to represent the characteristics of the surfaces. A vector model was then used to speed up the search of similar surfaces that share similar visual words with the query interface. Second, we developed an approach for accurate protein binding site comparison. Our algorithm provides an accurate binding site alignment by applying a two-level heuristic process which progressively refines alignment results from coarse surface point level to accurate residue atom level. This setting allowed us to explore different combinations of pairs of corresponding residues, thus improving the alignment quality of the binding site surfaces. Finally, we introduced a parallel algorithm for global protein structure alignment. Specifically, to speed up the time-consuming structure alignment process of protein 3D structures, we designed a parallel protein structure alignment framework to exploit the parallelism of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). As a general-purpose GPU platform, the framework is capable of parallelizing traditional structure alignment algorithms. Our findings can be applied in various research areas, such as prediction of protein inte
ProLanGO: Protein Function Prediction Using Neural~Machine Translation Based on a Recurrent Neural Network
With the development of next generation sequencing techniques, it is fast and
cheap to determine protein sequences but relatively slow and expensive to
extract useful information from protein sequences because of limitations of
traditional biological experimental techniques. Protein function prediction has
been a long standing challenge to fill the gap between the huge amount of
protein sequences and the known function. In this paper, we propose a novel
method to convert the protein function problem into a language translation
problem by the new proposed protein sequence language "ProLan" to the protein
function language "GOLan", and build a neural machine translation model based
on recurrent neural networks to translate "ProLan" language to "GOLan"
language. We blindly tested our method by attending the latest third Critical
Assessment of Function Annotation (CAFA 3) in 2016, and also evaluate the
performance of our methods on selected proteins whose function was released
after CAFA competition. The good performance on the training and testing
datasets demonstrates that our new proposed method is a promising direction for
protein function prediction. In summary, we first time propose a method which
converts the protein function prediction problem to a language translation
problem and applies a neural machine translation model for protein function
prediction.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure
Application of protein structure alignments to iterated hidden Markov model protocols for structure prediction.
BackgroundOne of the most powerful methods for the prediction of protein structure from sequence information alone is the iterative construction of profile-type models. Because profiles are built from sequence alignments, the sequences included in the alignment and the method used to align them will be important to the sensitivity of the resulting profile. The inclusion of highly diverse sequences will presumably produce a more powerful profile, but distantly related sequences can be difficult to align accurately using only sequence information. Therefore, it would be expected that the use of protein structure alignments to improve the selection and alignment of diverse sequence homologs might yield improved profiles. However, the actual utility of such an approach has remained unclear.ResultsWe explored several iterative protocols for the generation of profile hidden Markov models. These protocols were tailored to allow the inclusion of protein structure alignments in the process, and were used for large-scale creation and benchmarking of structure alignment-enhanced models. We found that models using structure alignments did not provide an overall improvement over sequence-only models for superfamily-level structure predictions. However, the results also revealed that the structure alignment-enhanced models were complimentary to the sequence-only models, particularly at the edge of the "twilight zone". When the two sets of models were combined, they provided improved results over sequence-only models alone. In addition, we found that the beneficial effects of the structure alignment-enhanced models could not be realized if the structure-based alignments were replaced with sequence-based alignments. Our experiments with different iterative protocols for sequence-only models also suggested that simple protocol modifications were unable to yield equivalent improvements to those provided by the structure alignment-enhanced models. Finally, we found that models using structure alignments provided fold-level structure assignments that were superior to those produced by sequence-only models.ConclusionWhen attempting to predict the structure of remote homologs, we advocate a combined approach in which both traditional models and models incorporating structure alignments are used
DeepSF: deep convolutional neural network for mapping protein sequences to folds
Motivation
Protein fold recognition is an important problem in structural
bioinformatics. Almost all traditional fold recognition methods use sequence
(homology) comparison to indirectly predict the fold of a tar get protein based
on the fold of a template protein with known structure, which cannot explain
the relationship between sequence and fold. Only a few methods had been
developed to classify protein sequences into a small number of folds due to
methodological limitations, which are not generally useful in practice.
Results
We develop a deep 1D-convolution neural network (DeepSF) to directly classify
any protein se quence into one of 1195 known folds, which is useful for both
fold recognition and the study of se quence-structure relationship. Different
from traditional sequence alignment (comparison) based methods, our method
automatically extracts fold-related features from a protein sequence of any
length and map it to the fold space. We train and test our method on the
datasets curated from SCOP1.75, yielding a classification accuracy of 80.4%. On
the independent testing dataset curated from SCOP2.06, the classification
accuracy is 77.0%. We compare our method with a top profile profile alignment
method - HHSearch on hard template-based and template-free modeling targets of
CASP9-12 in terms of fold recognition accuracy. The accuracy of our method is
14.5%-29.1% higher than HHSearch on template-free modeling targets and
4.5%-16.7% higher on hard template-based modeling targets for top 1, 5, and 10
predicted folds. The hidden features extracted from sequence by our method is
robust against sequence mutation, insertion, deletion and truncation, and can
be used for other protein pattern recognition problems such as protein
clustering, comparison and ranking.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure
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