4,646 research outputs found
Towards Reliable Automatic Protein Structure Alignment
A variety of methods have been proposed for structure similarity calculation,
which are called structure alignment or superposition. One major shortcoming in
current structure alignment algorithms is in their inherent design, which is
based on local structure similarity. In this work, we propose a method to
incorporate global information in obtaining optimal alignments and
superpositions. Our method, when applied to optimizing the TM-score and the GDT
score, produces significantly better results than current state-of-the-art
protein structure alignment tools. Specifically, if the highest TM-score found
by TMalign is lower than (0.6) and the highest TM-score found by one of the
tested methods is higher than (0.5), there is a probability of (42%) that
TMalign failed to find TM-scores higher than (0.5), while the same probability
is reduced to (2%) if our method is used. This could significantly improve the
accuracy of fold detection if the cutoff TM-score of (0.5) is used.
In addition, existing structure alignment algorithms focus on structure
similarity alone and simply ignore other important similarities, such as
sequence similarity. Our approach has the capacity to incorporate multiple
similarities into the scoring function. Results show that sequence similarity
aids in finding high quality protein structure alignments that are more
consistent with eye-examined alignments in HOMSTRAD. Even when structure
similarity itself fails to find alignments with any consistency with
eye-examined alignments, our method remains capable of finding alignments
highly similar to, or even identical to, eye-examined alignments.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on
Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013
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
Pairwise alignment incorporating dipeptide covariation
Motivation: Standard algorithms for pairwise protein sequence alignment make
the simplifying assumption that amino acid substitutions at neighboring sites
are uncorrelated. This assumption allows implementation of fast algorithms for
pairwise sequence alignment, but it ignores information that could conceivably
increase the power of remote homolog detection. We examine the validity of this
assumption by constructing extended substitution matrixes that encapsulate the
observed correlations between neighboring sites, by developing an efficient and
rigorous algorithm for pairwise protein sequence alignment that incorporates
these local substitution correlations, and by assessing the ability of this
algorithm to detect remote homologies. Results: Our analysis indicates that
local correlations between substitutions are not strong on the average.
Furthermore, incorporating local substitution correlations into pairwise
alignment did not lead to a statistically significant improvement in remote
homology detection. Therefore, the standard assumption that individual residues
within protein sequences evolve independently of neighboring positions appears
to be an efficient and appropriate approximation
FFAS server: novel features and applications.
The Fold and Function Assignment System (FFAS) server [Jaroszewski et al. (2005) FFAS03: a server for profile-profile sequence alignments. Nucleic Acids Research, 33, W284-W288] implements the algorithm for protein profile-profile alignment introduced originally in [Rychlewski et al. (2000) Comparison of sequence profiles. Strategies for structural predictions using sequence information. Protein Science: a Publication of the Protein Society, 9, 232-241]. Here, we present updates, changes and novel functionality added to the server since 2005 and discuss its new applications. The sequence database used to calculate sequence profiles was enriched by adding sets of publicly available metagenomic sequences. The profile of a user's protein can now be compared with ∼20 additional profile databases, including several complete proteomes, human proteins involved in genetic diseases and a database of microbial virulence factors. A newly developed interface uses a system of tabs, allowing the user to navigate multiple results pages, and also includes novel functionality, such as a dotplot graph viewer, modeling tools, an improved 3D alignment viewer and links to the database of structural similarities. The FFAS server was also optimized for speed: running times were reduced by an order of magnitude. The FFAS server, http://ffas.godziklab.org, has no log-in requirement, albeit there is an option to register and store results in individual, password-protected directories. Source code and Linux executables for the FFAS program are available for download from the FFAS server
The Parallelism Motifs of Genomic Data Analysis
Genomic data sets are growing dramatically as the cost of sequencing
continues to decline and small sequencing devices become available. Enormous
community databases store and share this data with the research community, but
some of these genomic data analysis problems require large scale computational
platforms to meet both the memory and computational requirements. These
applications differ from scientific simulations that dominate the workload on
high end parallel systems today and place different requirements on programming
support, software libraries, and parallel architectural design. For example,
they involve irregular communication patterns such as asynchronous updates to
shared data structures. We consider several problems in high performance
genomics analysis, including alignment, profiling, clustering, and assembly for
both single genomes and metagenomes. We identify some of the common
computational patterns or motifs that help inform parallelization strategies
and compare our motifs to some of the established lists, arguing that at least
two key patterns, sorting and hashing, are missing
Exploring the function and evolution of proteins using domain families
Proteins are frequently composed of multiple domains which fold
independently. These are often evolutionarily distinct units which can be
adapted and reused in other proteins. The classification of protein domains
into evolutionary families facilitates the study of their evolution and function.
In this thesis such classifications are used firstly to examine methods for
identifying evolutionary relationships (homology) between protein domains.
Secondly a specific approach for predicting their function is developed.
Lastly they are used in studying the evolution of protein complexes.
Tools for identifying evolutionary relationships between proteins are
central to computational biology. They aid in classifying families of proteins,
giving clues about the function of proteins and the study of molecular
evolution. The first chapter of this thesis concerns the effectiveness of cutting
edge methods in identifying evolutionary relationships between protein
domains.
The identification of evolutionary relationships between proteins can
give clues as to their function. The second chapter of this thesis concerns the
development of a method to identify proteins involved in the same biological
process. This method is based on the concept of domain fusion whereby
pairs of proteins from one organism with a concerted function are sometimes
found fused into single proteins in a different organism. Using protein
domain classifications it is possible to identify these relationships.
Most proteins do not act in isolation but carry out their function by
binding to other proteins in complexes; little is understood about the
evolution of such complexes. In the third chapter of this thesis the evolution
of complexes is examined in two representative model organisms using
protein domain families. In this work, protein domain superfamilies allow
distantly related parts of complexes to be identified in order to determine
how homologous units are reused
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
Distributed Many-to-Many Protein Sequence Alignment using Sparse Matrices
Identifying similar protein sequences is a core step in many computational
biology pipelines such as detection of homologous protein sequences, generation
of similarity protein graphs for downstream analysis, functional annotation and
gene location. Performance and scalability of protein similarity searches have
proven to be a bottleneck in many bioinformatics pipelines due to increases in
cheap and abundant sequencing data. This work presents a new distributed-memory
software, PASTIS. PASTIS relies on sparse matrix computations for efficient
identification of possibly similar proteins. We use distributed sparse matrices
for scalability and show that the sparse matrix infrastructure is a great fit
for protein similarity searches when coupled with a fully-distributed
dictionary of sequences that allows remote sequence requests to be fulfilled.
Our algorithm incorporates the unique bias in amino acid sequence substitution
in searches without altering the basic sparse matrix model, and in turn,
achieves ideal scaling up to millions of protein sequences.Comment: To appear in International Conference for High Performance Computing,
Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'20
Probing Metagenomics by Rapid Cluster Analysis of Very Large Datasets
BACKGROUND: The scale and diversity of metagenomic sequencing projects challenge both our technical and conceptual approaches in gene and genome annotations. The recent Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) expedition yielded millions of predicted protein sequences, which significantly altered the landscape of known protein space by more than doubling its size and adding thousands of new families (Yooseph et al., 2007 PLoS Biol 5, e16). Such datasets, not only by their sheer size, but also by many other features, defy conventional analysis and annotation methods. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In this study, we describe an approach for rapid analysis of the sequence diversity and the internal structure of such very large datasets by advanced clustering strategies using the newly modified CD-HIT algorithm. We performed a hierarchical clustering analysis on the 17.4 million Open Reading Frames (ORFs) identified from the GOS study and found over 33 thousand large predicted protein clusters comprising nearly 6 million sequences. Twenty percent of these clusters did not match known protein families by sequence similarity search and might represent novel protein families. Distributions of the large clusters were illustrated on organism composition, functional class, and sample locations. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Our clustering took about two orders of magnitude less computational effort than the similar protein family analysis of original GOS study. This approach will help to analyze other large metagenomic datasets in the future. A Web server with our clustering results and annotations of predicted protein clusters is available online at http://tools.camera.calit2.net/gos under the CAMERA project
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