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Protein binding hot spots prediction from sequence only by a new ensemble learning method

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Abstract

Hot spots are interfacial core areas of binding proteins, which have been applied as targets in drug design. Experimental methods are costly in both time and expense to locate hot spot areas. Recently, in-silicon computational methods have been widely used for hot spot prediction through sequence or structure characterization. As the structural information of proteins is not always solved, and thus hot spot identification from amino acid sequences only is more useful for real-life applications. This work proposes a new sequence-based model that combines physicochemical features with the relative accessible surface area of amino acid sequences for hot spot prediction. The model consists of 83 classifiers involving the IBk (Instance-based k means) algorithm, where instances are encoded by important properties extracted from a total of 544 properties in the AAindex1 (Amino Acid Index) database. Then top-performance classifiers are selected to form an ensemble by a majority voting technique. The ensemble classifier outperforms the state-of-the-art computational methods, yielding an F1 score of 0.80 on the benchmark binding interface database (BID) test set.Availability: http://www2.ahu.edu.cn/pchen/web/HotspotEC.htm.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61672035, 61300058, 61472282, 61271098 and 61374181).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China

    Shan-Shan Hu & Peng Chen

  2. Institute of Health Sciences, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, Anhui, China

    Shan-Shan Hu & Peng Chen

  3. School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Anhui University of Technology, Ma′anshan, 243032, Anhui, China

    Bing Wang

  4. Advanced Analytics Institute and Centre for Health Technologies, University of Technology, Sydney, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Peng Chen & Jinyan Li

Authors
  1. Shan-Shan Hu
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  2. Peng Chen
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  3. Bing Wang
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  4. Jinyan Li
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Author contributions

SH and PC conceived the study; SH participated in the experimental design; SH and PC carried it out and drafted the manuscript. All authors revised the manuscript critically. JL and PC approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Peng Chen.

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Handling Editor: L. Taher.

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Hu, SS., Chen, P., Wang, B. et al. Protein binding hot spots prediction from sequence only by a new ensemble learning method. Amino Acids 49, 1773–1785 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-017-2474-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-017-2474-6

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