Prediction and Analysis of Post-Translational Pyruvoyl Residue Modification Sites from Internal Serines in Proteins

PLoS One. 2013 Jun 21;8(6):e66678. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0066678. Print 2013.

Abstract

Most of pyruvoyl-dependent proteins observed in prokaryotes and eukaryotes are critical regulatory enzymes, which are primary targets of inhibitors for anti-cancer and anti-parasitic therapy. These proteins undergo an autocatalytic, intramolecular self-cleavage reaction in which a covalently bound pyruvoyl group is generated on a conserved serine residue. Traditional detections of the modified serine sites are performed by experimental approaches, which are often labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this study, we initiated in an attempt for the computational predictions of such serine sites with Feature Selection based on a Random Forest. Since only a small number of experimentally verified pyruvoyl-modified proteins are collected in the protein database at its current version, we only used a small dataset in this study. After removing proteins with sequence identities >60%, a non-redundant dataset was generated and was used, which contained only 46 proteins, with one pyruvoyl serine site for each protein. Several types of features were considered in our method including PSSM conservation scores, disorders, secondary structures, solvent accessibilities, amino acid factors and amino acid occurrence frequencies. As a result, a pretty good performance was achieved in our dataset. The best 100.00% accuracy and 1.0000 MCC value were obtained from the training dataset, and 93.75% accuracy and 0.8441 MCC value from the testing dataset. The optimal feature set contained 9 features. Analysis of the optimal feature set indicated the important roles of some specific features in determining the pyruvoyl-group-serine sites, which were consistent with several results of earlier experimental studies. These selected features may shed some light on the in-depth understanding of the mechanism of the post-translational self-maturation process, providing guidelines for experimental validation. Future work should be made as more pyruvoyl-modified proteins are found and the method should be evaluated on larger datasets. At last, the predicting software can be downloaded from http://www.nkbiox.com/sub/pyrupred/index.html.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Area Under Curve
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Databases, Protein
  • Proteins / metabolism*
  • ROC Curve
  • Serine / metabolism*

Substances

  • Proteins
  • Serine

Grants and funding

This contribution is supported by National Basic Research Program of China (2011CB510102, 2011CB510101), National Science Foundation of China (81171342, 81201148), Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (No.12YZ120, No. 12ZZ087), the grant of “The First-class Discipline of Universities in Shanghai”. Natural science fund projects of Jilin province (201215059), development of science and technology plan projects of Jilin province (20100733, 201101074), SRF for ROCS, SEM (2009-36), Scientific Research Foundation (Jilin Department of Science & Technology, 200705314, 20090175, 20100733), Scientific Research Foundation (Jilin Department of Health, 2010Z068), SRF for ROCS (Jilin Department of Human Resource & Social Security, 2012–2014). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.