Skip Navigation

Bioinformatics 2009 25(12):i247-i1252; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp209
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (Print PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Comments: Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when Comments are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Mintz-Oron, S.
Right arrow Articles by Shlomi, T.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Mintz-Oron, S.
Right arrow Articles by Shlomi, T.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Network-based prediction of metabolic enzymes' subcellular localization

Shira Mintz-Oron 1,*, Asaph Aharoni 1, Eytan Ruppin 2,3 and Tomer Shlomi 4,*

1Department of Plant Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, 2School of Computer Science, 3School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978 and 4Faculty of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.


  Abstract

Motivation: Revealing the subcellular localization of proteins within membrane-bound compartments is of a major importance for inferring protein function. Though current high-throughput localization experiments provide valuable data, they are costly and time-consuming, and due to technical difficulties not readily applicable for many Eukaryotes. Physical characteristics of proteins, such as sequence targeting signals and amino acid composition are commonly used to predict subcellular localizations using computational approaches. Recently it was shown that protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks can be used to significantly improve the prediction accuracy of protein subcellular localization. However, as high-throughput PPI data depend on costly high-throughput experiments and are currently available for only a few organisms, the scope of such methods is yet limited.

Results: This study presents a novel constraint-based method for predicting subcellular localization of enzymes based on their embedding metabolic network, relying on a parsimony principle of a minimal number of cross-membrane metabolite transporters. In a cross-validation test of predicting known subcellular localization of yeast enzymes, the method is shown to be markedly robust, providing accurate localization predictions even when only 20% of the known enzyme localizations are given as input. It is shown to outperform pathway enrichment-based methods both in terms of prediction accuracy and in its ability to predict the subcellular localization of entire metabolic pathways when no a-priori pathway-specific localization data is available (and hence enrichment methods are bound to fail). With the number of available metabolic networks already reaching more than 600 and growing fast, the new method may significantly contribute to the identification of enzyme localizations in many different organisms.

Contact: shira.mintz{at}weizmann.ac.il; tomersh{at}cs.technion.ac.il


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.