TransPhos: A Deep-Learning Model for General Phosphorylation Site Prediction Based on Transformer-Encoder Architecture.

Journal: International journal of molecular sciences
PMID:

Abstract

Protein phosphorylation is one of the most critical post-translational modifications of proteins in eukaryotes, which is essential for a variety of biological processes. Plenty of attempts have been made to improve the performance of computational predictors for phosphorylation site prediction. However, most of them are based on extra domain knowledge or feature selection. In this article, we present a novel deep learning-based predictor, named TransPhos, which is constructed using a transformer encoder and densely connected convolutional neural network blocks, for predicting phosphorylation sites. Data experiments are conducted on the datasets of PPA (version 3.0) and Phospho. ELM. The experimental results show that our TransPhos performs better than several deep learning models, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long-term and short-term memory networks (LSTM), Recurrent neural networks (RNN) and Fully connected neural networks (FCNN), and some state-of-the-art deep learning-based prediction tools, including GPS2.1, NetPhos, PPRED, Musite, PhosphoSVM, SKIPHOS, and DeepPhos. Our model achieves a good performance on the training datasets of Serine (S), Threonine (T), and Tyrosine (Y), with AUC values of 0.8579, 0.8335, and 0.6953 using 10-fold cross-validation tests, respectively, and demonstrates that the presented TransPhos tool considerably outperforms competing predictors in general protein phosphorylation site prediction.

Authors

  • Xun Wang
    College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum, Dongying, China.
  • Zhiyuan Zhang
    Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Science, Institute of Agricultural Resources and Environment, SAAS, Institute of Edible Fungi, Shizishan Road NO. 4, Jinjiang District, Chengdu, 610066, China.
  • Chaogang Zhang
    College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266555, China.
  • Xiangyu Meng
    College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266555, China.
  • Xin Shi
    Department of Automation, Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China.
  • Peng Qu
    College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266555, China.