3,244 research outputs found
Alignment of helical membrane protein sequences using AlignMe
Few sequence alignment methods have been designed specifically for integral membrane proteins, even though these important proteins have distinct evolutionary and structural properties that might affect their alignments. Existing approaches typically consider membrane-related information either by using membrane-specific substitution matrices or by assigning distinct penalties for gap creation in transmembrane and non-transmembrane regions. Here, we ask whether favoring matching of predicted transmembrane segments within a standard dynamic programming algorithm can improve the accuracy of pairwise membrane protein sequence alignments. We tested various strategies using a specifically designed program called AlignMe. An updated set of homologous membrane protein structures, called HOMEP2, was used as a reference for optimizing the gap penalties. The best of the membrane-protein optimized approaches were then tested on an independent reference set of membrane protein sequence alignments from the BAliBASE collection. When secondary structure (S) matching was combined with evolutionary information (using a position-specific substitution matrix (P)), in an approach we called AlignMePS, the resultant pairwise alignments were typically among the most accurate over a broad range of sequence similarities when compared to available methods. Matching transmembrane predictions (T), in addition to evolutionary information, and secondary-structure predictions, in an approach called AlignMePST, generally reduces the accuracy of the alignments of closely-related proteins in the BAliBASE set relative to AlignMePS, but may be useful in cases of extremely distantly related proteins for which sequence information is less informative. The open source AlignMe code is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/alignmeâ/, and at http://www.forrestlab.org, along with an online server and the HOMEP2 data set
The posterior-Viterbi: a new decoding algorithm for hidden Markov models
Background: Hidden Markov models (HMM) are powerful machine learning tools
successfully applied to problems of computational Molecular Biology. In a
predictive task, the HMM is endowed with a decoding algorithm in order to
assign the most probable state path, and in turn the class labeling, to an
unknown sequence. The Viterbi and the posterior decoding algorithms are the
most common. The former is very efficient when one path dominates, while the
latter, even though does not guarantee to preserve the automaton grammar, is
more effective when several concurring paths have similar probabilities. A
third good alternative is 1-best, which was shown to perform equal or better
than Viterbi. Results: In this paper we introduce the posterior-Viterbi (PV) a
new decoding which combines the posterior and Viterbi algorithms. PV is a two
step process: first the posterior probability of each state is computed and
then the best posterior allowed path through the model is evaluated by a
Viterbi algorithm.
Conclusions: We show that PV decoding performs better than other algorithms
first on toy models and then on the computational biological problem of the
prediction of the topology of beta-barrel membrane proteins.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure
The Phyre2 web portal for protein modeling, prediction and analysis
Phyre2 is a suite of tools available on the web to predict and analyze protein structure, function and mutations. The focus of Phyre2 is to provide biologists with a simple and intuitive interface to state-of-the-art protein bioinformatics tools. Phyre2 replaces Phyre, the original version of the server for which we previously published a paper in Nature Protocols. In this updated protocol, we describe Phyre2, which uses advanced remote homology detection methods to build 3D models, predict ligand binding sites and analyze the effect of amino acid variants (e.g., nonsynonymous SNPs (nsSNPs)) for a user's protein sequence. Users are guided through results by a simple interface at a level of detail they determine. This protocol will guide users from submitting a protein sequence to interpreting the secondary and tertiary structure of their models, their domain composition and model quality. A range of additional available tools is described to find a protein structure in a genome, to submit large number of sequences at once and to automatically run weekly searches for proteins that are difficult to model. The server is available at http://www.sbg.bio.ic.ac.uk/phyre2. A typical structure prediction will be returned between 30 min and 2 h after submission
Deep learning extends de novo protein modelling coverage of genomes using iteratively predicted structural constraints
The inapplicability of amino acid covariation methods to small protein
families has limited their use for structural annotation of whole genomes.
Recently, deep learning has shown promise in allowing accurate residue-residue
contact prediction even for shallow sequence alignments. Here we introduce
DMPfold, which uses deep learning to predict inter-atomic distance bounds, the
main chain hydrogen bond network, and torsion angles, which it uses to build
models in an iterative fashion. DMPfold produces more accurate models than two
popular methods for a test set of CASP12 domains, and works just as well for
transmembrane proteins. Applied to all Pfam domains without known structures,
confident models for 25% of these so-called dark families were produced in
under a week on a small 200 core cluster. DMPfold provides models for 16% of
human proteome UniProt entries without structures, generates accurate models
with fewer than 100 sequences in some cases, and is freely available.Comment: JGG and SMK contributed equally to the wor
PRED-CLASS: cascading neural networks for generalized protein classification and genome-wide applications
A cascading system of hierarchical, artificial neural networks (named
PRED-CLASS) is presented for the generalized classification of proteins into
four distinct classes-transmembrane, fibrous, globular, and mixed-from
information solely encoded in their amino acid sequences. The architecture of
the individual component networks is kept very simple, reducing the number of
free parameters (network synaptic weights) for faster training, improved
generalization, and the avoidance of data overfitting. Capturing information
from as few as 50 protein sequences spread among the four target classes (6
transmembrane, 10 fibrous, 13 globular, and 17 mixed), PRED-CLASS was able to
obtain 371 correct predictions out of a set of 387 proteins (success rate
approximately 96%) unambiguously assigned into one of the target classes. The
application of PRED-CLASS to several test sets and complete proteomes of
several organisms demonstrates that such a method could serve as a valuable
tool in the annotation of genomic open reading frames with no functional
assignment or as a preliminary step in fold recognition and ab initio structure
prediction methods. Detailed results obtained for various data sets and
completed genomes, along with a web sever running the PRED-CLASS algorithm, can
be accessed over the World Wide Web at http://o2.biol.uoa.gr/PRED-CLAS
A biophysical approach to large-scale protein-DNA binding data
About this book * Cutting-edge genome analysis methods from leading bioinformaticians An accurate description of current scientific developments in the field of bioinformatics and computational implementation is presented by research of the BioSapiens Network of Excellence. Bioinformatics is essential for annotating the structure and function of genes, proteins and the analysis of complete genomes and to molecular biology and biochemistry. Included is an overview of bioinformatics, the full spectrum of genome annotation approaches including; genome analysis and gene prediction, gene regulation analysis and expression, genome variation and QTL analysis, large scale protein annotation of function and structure, annotation and prediction of protein interactions, and the organization and annotation of molecular networks and biochemical pathways. Also covered is a technical framework to organize and represent genome data using the DAS technology and work in the annotation of two large genomic sets: HIV/HCV viral genomes and splicing alternatives potentially encoded in 1% of the human genome
Transmembrane protein topology prediction using support vector machines
Background: Alpha-helical transmembrane (TM) proteins are involved in a wide range of important biological processes such as cell signaling, transport of membrane-impermeable molecules, cell-cell communication, cell recognition and cell adhesion. Many are also prime drug targets, and it has been estimated that more than half of all drugs currently on the market target membrane proteins. However, due to the experimental difficulties involved in obtaining high quality crystals, this class of protein is severely under-represented in structural databases. In the absence of structural data, sequence-based prediction methods allow TM protein topology to be investigated.Results: We present a support vector machine-based (SVM) TM protein topology predictor that integrates both signal peptide and re-entrant helix prediction, benchmarked with full cross-validation on a novel data set of 131 sequences with known crystal structures. The method achieves topology prediction accuracy of 89%, while signal peptides and re-entrant helices are predicted with 93% and 44% accuracy respectively. An additional SVM trained to discriminate between globular and TM proteins detected zero false positives, with a low false negative rate of 0.4%. We present the results of applying these tools to a number of complete genomes. Source code, data sets and a web server are freely available from http://bioinf.cs.ucl.ac.uk/psipred/.Conclusion: The high accuracy of TM topology prediction which includes detection of both signal peptides and re-entrant helices, combined with the ability to effectively discriminate between TM and globular proteins, make this method ideally suited to whole genome annotation of alpha-helical transmembrane proteins
Evaluation of methods for predicting the topology of ÎČ-barrel outer membrane proteins and a consensus prediction method
BACKGROUND: Prediction of the transmembrane strands and topology of ÎČ-barrel outer membrane proteins is of interest in current bioinformatics research. Several methods have been applied so far for this task, utilizing different algorithmic techniques and a number of freely available predictors exist. The methods can be grossly divided to those based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), on Neural Networks (NNs) and on Support Vector Machines (SVMs). In this work, we compare the different available methods for topology prediction of ÎČ-barrel outer membrane proteins. We evaluate their performance on a non-redundant dataset of 20 ÎČ-barrel outer membrane proteins of gram-negative bacteria, with structures known at atomic resolution. Also, we describe, for the first time, an effective way to combine the individual predictors, at will, to a single consensus prediction method. RESULTS: We assess the statistical significance of the performance of each prediction scheme and conclude that Hidden Markov Model based methods, HMM-B2TMR, ProfTMB and PRED-TMBB, are currently the best predictors, according to either the per-residue accuracy, the segments overlap measure (SOV) or the total number of proteins with correctly predicted topologies in the test set. Furthermore, we show that the available predictors perform better when only transmembrane ÎČ-barrel domains are used for prediction, rather than the precursor full-length sequences, even though the HMM-based predictors are not influenced significantly. The consensus prediction method performs significantly better than each individual available predictor, since it increases the accuracy up to 4% regarding SOV and up to 15% in correctly predicted topologies. CONCLUSIONS: The consensus prediction method described in this work, optimizes the predicted topology with a dynamic programming algorithm and is implemented in a web-based application freely available to non-commercial users at
TOPCONS: consensus prediction of membrane protein topology
TOPCONS (http://topcons.net/) is a web server for consensus prediction of membrane protein topology. The underlying algorithm combines an arbitrary number of topology predictions into one consensus prediction and quantifies the reliability of the prediction based on the level of agreement between the underlying methods, both on the protein level and on the level of individual TM regions. Benchmarking the method shows that overall performance levels match the best available topology prediction methods, and for sequences with high reliability scores, performance is increased by âŒ10 percentage points. The web interface allows for constraining parts of the sequence to a known inside/outside location, and detailed results are displayed both graphically and in text format
CCTOP: a Consensus Constrained TOPology prediction web server.
The Consensus Constrained TOPology prediction (CCTOP; http://cctop.enzim.ttk.mta.hu) server is a web-based application providing transmembrane topology prediction. In addition to utilizing 10 different state-of-the-art topology prediction methods, the CCTOP server incorporates topology information from existing experimental and computational sources available in the PDBTM, TOPDB and TOPDOM databases using the probabilistic framework of hidden Markov model. The server provides the option to precede the topology prediction with signal peptide prediction and transmembrane-globular protein discrimination. The initial result can be recalculated by (de)selecting any of the prediction methods or mapped experiments or by adding user specified constraints. CCTOP showed superior performance to existing approaches. The reliability of each prediction is also calculated, which correlates with the accuracy of the per protein topology prediction. The prediction results and the collected experimental information are visualized on the CCTOP home page and can be downloaded in XML format. Programmable access of the CCTOP server is also available, and an example of client-side script is provided
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