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Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on January 9, 2009
Bioinformatics 2009 25(4):443-450; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn664
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Masking residues using context-specific evolutionary conservation significantly improves short linear motif discovery

Norman E. Davey 1, Denis C. Shields 1 and Richard J. Edwards 2,*

1UCD Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory, UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Sciences, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland and 2School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Boldrewood Campus, Southampton SO16 7PX, UK

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.


  Abstract

Motivation: Short linear motifs (SLiMs) are important mediators of protein–protein interactions. Their short and degenerate nature presents a challenge for computational discovery. We sought to improve SLiM discovery by incorporating evolutionary information, since SLiMs are more conserved than surrounding residues.

Results: We have developed a new method that assesses the evolutionary signal of a residue in its sequence and structural context. Under-conserved residues are masked out prior to SLiM discovery, allowing incorporation into the existing statistical model employed by SLiMFinder. The method shows considerable robustness in terms of both the conservation score used for individual residues and the size of the sequence neighbourhood. Optimal parameters significantly improve return of known functional motifs from benchmarking data, raising the return of significant validated SLiMs from typical human interaction datasets from 20% to 60%, while retaining the high level of stringency needed for application to real biological data. The success of this regime indicates that it could be of general benefit to computational annotation and prediction of protein function at the sequence level.

Availability: All data and tools in this article are available at http://bioware.ucd.ie/~slimdisc/slimfinder/conmasking/.

Contact: r.edwards{at}southampton.ac.uk

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Associate Editor: Dmitrij Frishman

Received on September 4, 2008; revised on December 1, 2008; accepted on December 27, 2008

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