Title
Amino acid composition predicts prion activity.
Abstract
Many prion-forming proteins contain glutamine/asparagine (Q/N) rich domains, and there are conflicting opinions as to the role of primary sequence in their conversion to the prion form: is this phenomenon driven primarily by amino acid composition, or, as a recent computational analysis suggested, dependent on the presence of short sequence elements with high amyloid-forming potential. The argument for the importance of short sequence elements hinged on the relatively-high accuracy obtained using a method that utilizes a collection of length-six sequence elements with known amyloid-forming potential. We weigh in on this question and demonstrate that when those sequence elements are permuted, even higher accuracy is obtained; we also propose a novel multiple-instance machine learning method that uses sequence composition alone, and achieves better accuracy than all existing prion prediction approaches. While we expect there to be elements of primary sequence that affect the process, our experiments suggest that sequence composition alone is sufficient for predicting protein sequences that are likely to form prions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005465
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Field
DocType
Volume
Biology,Biochemistry,Amino acid composition,Genetics
Journal
13
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1553-734X
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.66
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fayyaz ul Amir Afsar Minhas1279.37
Eric D. Ross221.00
Asa Ben-Hur31405110.73