iMPT-FDNPL: Identification of Membrane Protein Types with Functional Domains and a Natural Language Processing Approach.

Journal: Computational and mathematical methods in medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

Membrane protein is an important kind of proteins. It plays essential roles in several cellular processes. Based on the intramolecular arrangements and positions in a cell, membrane proteins can be divided into several types. It is reported that the types of a membrane protein are highly related to its functions. Determination of membrane protein types is a hot topic in recent years. A plenty of computational methods have been proposed so far. Some of them used functional domain information to encode proteins. However, this procedure was still crude. In this study, we designed a novel feature extraction scheme to obtain informative features of proteins from their functional domain information. Such scheme termed domains as words and proteins, represented by its domains, as sentences. The natural language processing approach, word2vector, was applied to access the features of domains, which were further refined to protein features. Based on these features, RAndom k-labELsets with random forest as the base classifier was employed to build the multilabel classifier, namely, iMPT-FDNPL. The tenfold cross-validation results indicated the good performance of such classifier. Furthermore, such classifier was superior to other classifiers based on features derived from functional domains via one-hot scheme or derived from other properties of proteins, suggesting the effectiveness of protein features generated by the proposed scheme.

Authors

  • Wei Chen
    Department of Urology, Zigong Fourth People's Hospital, Sichuan, China.
  • Lei Chen
    Department of Chemistry, Stony Brook University Stony Brook NY USA.
  • Qi Dai
    The First Clinical Medical College, Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine, Nanning 530001, China.