Abdollah Dehzangi

Gram-positive and Gram-negative protein subcellular localization by incorporating evolutionary-based descriptors into Chou׳s general PseAAC

Protein subcellular localization is defined as predicting the functioning location of a given protein in the cell. It is considered an important step towards protein function prediction and drug design. Recent studies have shown that relying on Gene Ontology (GO) for feature extraction can improve protein subcellular localization prediction performance. However, relying solely on GO, this problem remains unsolved. At the same time, the impact of other sources of features especially evolutionary-based features has not been explored adequately for this task. In this study, we aim to extract discriminative evolutionary features to tackle this problem. To do this, we propose two segmentation based feature extraction methods to explore potential local evolutionary-based information for Gram-positive and Gram-negative subcellular localizations. We will show that by applying a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to our extracted features, we are able to enhance Gram-positive and Gram-negative subcellular localization prediction accuracies by up to 6.4% better than previous studies including the studies that used GO for feature extraction.

Improving prediction of secondary structure, local backbone angles, and solvent accessible surface area of proteins by iterative deep learning

Direct prediction of protein structure from sequence is a challenging problem. An effective approach is to break it up into independent sub-problems. These sub-problems such as prediction of protein secondary structure can then be solved independently. In a previous study, we found that an iterative use of predicted secondary structure and backbone torsion angles can further improve secondary structure and torsion angle prediction. In this study, we expand the iterative features to include solvent accessible surface area and backbone angles and dihedrals based on Cα atoms. By using a deep learning neural network in three iterations, we achieved 82% accuracy for secondary structure prediction, 0.76 for the correlation coefficient between predicted and actual solvent accessible surface area, 19° and 30° for mean absolute errors of backbone φ and ψ angles, respectively, and 8° and 32° for mean absolute errors of Cα-based θ and τ angles, respectively, for an independent test dataset of 1199 proteins. The accuracy of the method is slightly lower for 72 CASP 11 targets but much higher than those of model structures from current state-of-the-art techniques. This suggests the potentially beneficial use of these predicted properties for model assessment and ranking.

A feature extraction technique using bi-gram probabilities of position specific scoring matrix for protein fold recognition

Discovering a three dimensional structure of a protein is a challenging task in biological science. Classifying a protein into one of its folds is an intermediate step for deciphering the three dimensional protein structure. The protein fold recognition can be done by developing feature extraction techniques to accurately extract all the relevant information from a protein sequence and then by employing a suitable classifier to label an unknown protein. Several feature extraction techniques have been developed in the past but with limited recognition accuracy only. In this work, we have developed a feature extraction technique which is based on bi-grams computed directly from Position Specific Scoring Matrices and demonstrated its effectiveness on a benchmark dataset. The proposed technique exhibits an absolute improvement of around 10% compared with existing feature extraction techniques.

Proposing a highly accurate protein structural class predictor using segmentation-based features

BackgroundPrediction of the structural classes of proteins can provide important information about their functionalities as well as their major tertiary structures. It is also considered as an important step towards protein structure prediction problem. Despite all the efforts have been made so far, finding a fast and accurate computational approach to solve protein structural class prediction problem still remains a challenging problem in bioinformatics and computational biology.ResultsIn this study we propose segmented distribution and segmented auto covariance feature extraction methods to capture local and global discriminatory information from evolutionary profiles and predicted secondary structure of the proteins. By applying SVM to our extracted features, for the first time we enhance the protein structural class prediction accuracy to over 90% and 85% for two popular low-homology benchmarks that have been widely used in the literature. We report 92.2% and 86.3% prediction accuracies for 25PDB and 1189 benchmarks which are respectively up to 7.9% and 2.8% better than previously reported results for these two benchmarks.ConclusionBy proposing segmented distribution and segmented auto covariance feature extraction methods to capture local and global discriminatory information from evolutionary profiles and predicted secondary structure of the proteins, we are able to enhance the protein structural class prediction performance significantly.

Predicting backbone Cα angles and dihedrals from protein sequences by stacked sparse auto-encoder deep neural network

Because a nearly constant distance between two neighbouring Cα atoms, local backbone structure of proteins can be represented accurately by the angle between Cαi−1CαiCαi+1 (θ) and a dihedral angle rotated about the CαiCαi+1 bond (τ). θ and τ angles, as the representative of structural properties of three to four amino‐acid residues, offer a description of backbone conformations that is complementary to φ and ψ angles (single residue) and secondary structures (>3 residues). Here, we report the first machine‐learning technique for sequence‐based prediction of θ and τ angles. Predicted angles based on an independent test have a mean absolute error of 9° for θ and 34° for τ with a distribution on the θ‐τ plane close to that of native values. The average root‐mean‐square distance of 10‐residue fragment structures constructed from predicted θ and τ angles is only 1.9Å from their corresponding native structures. Predicted θ and τ angles are expected to be complementary to predicted ϕ and ψ angles and secondary structures for using in model validation and template‐based as well as template‐free structure prediction. The deep neural network learning technique is available as an on‐line server called Structural Property prediction with Integrated DEep neuRal network (SPIDER) at http://sparks‐lab.org.

A Combination of Feature Extraction Methods with an Ensemble of Different Classifiers for Protein Structural Class Prediction Problem

Better understanding of structural class of a given protein reveals important information about its overall folding type and its domain. It can also be directly used to provide critical information on general tertiary structure of a protein which has a profound impact on protein function determination and drug design. Despite tremendous enhancements made by pattern recognition-based approaches to solve this problem, it still remains as an unsolved issue for bioinformatics that demands more attention and exploration. In this study, we propose a novel feature extraction model that incorporates physicochemical and evolutionary-based information simultaneously. We also propose overlapped segmented distribution and autocorrelation-based feature extraction methods to provide more local and global discriminatory information. The proposed feature extraction methods are explored for 15 most promising attributes that are selected from a wide range of physicochemical-based attributes. Finally, by applying an ensemble of different classifiers namely, Adaboost.M1, LogitBoost, naive Bayes, multilayer perceptron (MLP), and support vector machine (SVM) we show enhancement of the protein structural class prediction accuracy for four popular benchmarks.

A Tri-Gram Based Feature Extraction Technique Using Linear Probabilities of Position Specific Scoring Matrix for Protein Fold Recognition

In biological sciences, the deciphering of a three dimensional structure of a protein sequence is considered to be an important and challenging task. The identification of protein folds from primary protein sequences is an intermediate step in discovering the three dimensional structure of a protein. This can be done by utilizing feature extraction technique to accurately extract all the relevant information followed by employing a suitable classifier to label an unknown protein. In the past, several feature extraction techniques have been developed but with limited recognition accuracy only. In this study, we have developed a feature extraction technique based on tri-grams computed directly from Position Specific Scoring Matrices. The effectiveness of the feature extraction technique has been shown on two benchmark datasets. The proposed technique exhibits up to 4.4% improvement in protein fold recognition accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art feature extraction techniques.

A strategy to select suitable physicochemical attributes of amino acids for protein fold recognition

BackgroundAssigning a protein into one of its folds is a transitional step for discovering three dimensional protein structure, which is a challenging task in bimolecular (biological) science. The present research focuses on: 1) the development of classifiers, and 2) the development of feature extraction techniques based on syntactic and/or physicochemical properties.ResultsApart from the above two main categories of research, we have shown that the selection of physicochemical attributes of the amino acids is an important step in protein fold recognition and has not been explored adequately. We have presented a multi-dimensional successive feature selection (MD-SFS) approach to systematically select attributes. The proposed method is applied on protein sequence data and an improvement of around 24% in fold recognition has been noted when selecting attributes appropriately.ConclusionThe MD-SFS has been applied successfully in selecting physicochemical attributes of the amino acids. The selected attributes show improved protein fold recognition performance.

Highly accurate sequence-based prediction of half-sphere exposures of amino acid residues in proteins

MOTIVATION Solvent exposure of amino acid residues of proteins plays an important role in understanding and predicting protein structure, function and interactions. Solvent exposure can be characterized by several measures including solvent accessible surface area (ASA), residue depth (RD) and contact numbers (CN). More recently, an orientation-dependent contact number called half-sphere exposure (HSE) was introduced by separating the contacts within upper and down half spheres defined according to the Cα-Cβ (HSEβ) vector or neighboring Cα-Cα vectors (HSEα). HSEα calculated from protein structures was found to better describe the solvent exposure over ASA, CN and RD in many applications. Thus, a sequence-based prediction is desirable, as most proteins do not have experimentally determined structures. To our best knowledge, there is no method to predict HSEα and only one method to predict HSEβ. RESULTS This study developed a novel method for predicting both HSEα and HSEβ (SPIDER-HSE) that achieved a consistent performance for 10-fold cross validation and two independent tests. The correlation coefficients between predicted and measured HSEβ (0.73 for upper sphere, 0.69 for down sphere and 0.76 for contact numbers) for the independent test set of 1199 proteins are significantly higher than existing methods. Moreover, predicted HSEα has a higher correlation coefficient (0.46) to the stability change by residue mutants than predicted HSEβ (0.37) and ASA (0.43). The results, together with its easy Cα-atom-based calculation, highlight the potential usefulness of predicted HSEα for protein structure prediction and refinement as well as function prediction. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The method is available at http://sparks-lab.org CONTACT yuedong.yang@griffith.edu.au or yaoqi.zhou@griffith.edu.au SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Predict Gram-Positive and Gram-Negative Subcellular Localization via Incorporating Evolutionary Information and Physicochemical Features Into Chou's General PseAAC

In this study, we used structural and evolutionary based features to represent the sequences of gram-positive and gram-negative subcellular localizations. To do this, we proposed a normalization method to construct a normalize Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) using the information from original PSSM. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method we compute feature vectors from normalize PSSM and by applying support vector machine (SVM) and naïve Bayes classifier, respectively, we compared achieved results with the previously reported results. We also computed features from original PSSM and normalized PSSM and compared their results. The archived results show enhancement in gram-positive and gram-negative subcellular localizations. Evaluating localization for each feature, our results indicate that employing SVM and concatenating features (amino acid composition feature, Dubchak feature (physicochemical-based features), normalized PSSM based auto-covariance feature and normalized PSSM based bigram feature) have higher accuracy while employing naïve Bayes classifier with normalized PSSM based auto-covariance feature proves to have high sensitivity for both benchmarks. Our reported results in terms of overall locative accuracy is 84.8% and overall absolute accuracy is 85.16% for gram-positive dataset; and, for gram-negative dataset, overall locative accuracy is 85.4% and overall absolute accuracy is 86.3%.