Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on January 12, 2006
Bioinformatics 2006 22(6):723-730; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btk038
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Automated discovery of 3D motifs for protein function annotation
Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Francisco, CA 94143-2250, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Motivation: Function inference from structure is facilitated by the use of patterns of residues (3D motifs), normally identified by expert knowledge, that correlate with function. As an alternative to often limited expert knowledge, we use machine-learning techniques to identify patterns of 310 residues that maximize function prediction. This approach allows us to test the assumption that residues that provide function are the most informative for predicting function.
Results: We apply our method, GASPS, to the haloacid dehalogenase, enolase, amidohydrolase and crotonase superfamilies and to the serine proteases. The motifs found by GASPS are as good at function prediction as 3D motifs based on expert knowledge. The GASPS motifs with the greatest ability to predict protein function consist mainly of known functional residues. However, several residues with no known functional role are equally predictive. For four groups, we show that the predictive power of our 3D motifs is comparable with or better than approaches that use the entire fold (Combinatorial-Extension) or sequence profiles (PSI-BLAST).
Availability: Source code is freely available for academic use by contacting the authors.
Contact: babbitt{at}cgl.ucsf.edu
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Received on October 5, 2005; revised on December 17, 2005; accepted on January 3, 2006
This article has been cited by other articles:
![]() |
P. F. Gherardini and M. Helmer-Citterich Structure-based function prediction: approaches and applications Brief Funct Genomic Proteomic, July 3, 2008; (2008) eln030v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
![]() |
B. H. Dessailly, M. F. Lensink, C. A. Orengo, and S. J. Wodak LigASite a database of biologically relevant binding sites in proteins with known apo-structures Nucleic Acids Res., January 11, 2008; 36(suppl_1): D667 - D673. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||

