1.
Template-Based Modeling of Protein-RNA Interactions.
Zheng, J, Kundrotas, PJ, Vakser, IA, Liu, S
PLoS computational biology. 2016;(9):e1005120
Abstract
Protein-RNA complexes formed by specific recognition between RNA and RNA-binding proteins play an important role in biological processes. More than a thousand of such proteins in human are curated and many novel RNA-binding proteins are to be discovered. Due to limitations of experimental approaches, computational techniques are needed for characterization of protein-RNA interactions. Although much progress has been made, adequate methodologies reliably providing atomic resolution structural details are still lacking. Although protein-RNA free docking approaches proved to be useful, in general, the template-based approaches provide higher quality of predictions. Templates are key to building a high quality model. Sequence/structure relationships were studied based on a representative set of binary protein-RNA complexes from PDB. Several approaches were tested for pairwise target/template alignment. The analysis revealed a transition point between random and correct binding modes. The results showed that structural alignment is better than sequence alignment in identifying good templates, suitable for generating protein-RNA complexes close to the native structure, and outperforms free docking, successfully predicting complexes where the free docking fails, including cases of significant conformational change upon binding. A template-based protein-RNA interaction modeling protocol PRIME was developed and benchmarked on a representative set of complexes.
2.
gDNA-Prot: Predict DNA-binding proteins by employing support vector machine and a novel numerical characterization of protein sequence.
Zhang, YP, Wuyunqiqige, , Zheng, W, Liu, S, Zhao, C
Journal of theoretical biology. 2016;:8-16
Abstract
DNA-binding proteins are the functional proteins in cells, which play an important role in various essential biological activities. An effective and fast computational method gDNA-Prot is proposed to predict DNA-binding proteins in this paper, which is a DNA-binding predictor that combines the support vector machine classifier and a novel kind of feature called graphical representation. The DNA-binding protein sequence information was described with the 20 probabilities of amino acids and the 23 new numerical graphical representation features of a protein sequence, based on 23 physicochemical properties of 20 amino acids. The Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was employed as feature selection method for removing the irrelevant features and reducing redundant features. The Sigmod function and Min-max normalization methods for PCA were applied to accelerate the training speed and obtain higher accuracy. Experiments demonstrated that the Principal Components Analysis with Sigmod function generated the best performance. The gDNA-Prot method was also compared with the DNAbinder, iDNA-Prot and DNA-Prot. The results suggested that gDNA-Prot outperformed the DNAbinder and iDNA-Prot. Although the DNA-Prot outperformed gDNA-Prot, gDNA-Prot was faster and convenient to predict the DNA-binding proteins. Additionally, the proposed gNDA-Prot method is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gdnaprot.