Prediction of Structural Patterns of Interest from Protein Primary Sequence through Structural Alphabet: Illustration to ATP/GTP Binding Site Prediction

The prediction of particular structural motifs associated to biological functions or to structure is of utmost importance. Given the increasing availability of primary sequences without any structure information, predictions from amino-acid (AA) sequences are essential. The proposed prediction method of structural motifs is a two-step approach based on a structural alphabet. This alphabet allows encoding any 3D structure into a 1D sequence of structural letters (SL). First, basic correspondence rules between AA and SL are learnt through genetic programming. Then, a Hidden Markov Model is learnt for each beforehand identified motif of interest. Finally, a probability to correspond to a given 3D motif for any given amino-acid sequence is provided. The method is applied on ATP binding sites to compare the efficiency of our method to other ones for a classical function. Then, the method ability to learn motifs corresponding to more rarely predicted functions or to other types of motifs is illustrated.