This article is part of the supplement: Selected proceedings from the Automated Function Prediction Meeting 2011
Proceedings
Homology-based inference sets the bar high for protein function prediction
1 TUM, Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology - I12 Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching/Munich, Germany
2 Institute of Advanced Study (TUM-IAS) Lichtenbergstr. 2a, 85748 Garching/Munich, Germany
3 New York Consortium on Membrane Protein Structure (NYCOMPS) & Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Columbia University, 701 West, 168th Street, New York, NY 10032, USA
BMC Bioinformatics 2013, 14(Suppl 3):S7 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-14-S3-S7
Published: 28 February 2013Abstract
Background
Any method that de novo predicts protein function should do better than random. More challenging, it also ought to outperform simple homology-based inference.
Methods
Here, we describe a few methods that predict protein function exclusively through homology. Together, they set the bar or lower limit for future improvements.
Results and conclusions
During the development of these methods, we faced two surprises. Firstly, our most successful implementation for the baseline ranked very high at CAFA1. In fact, our best combination of homology-based methods fared only slightly worse than the top-of-the-line prediction method from the Jones group. Secondly, although the concept of homology-based inference is simple, this work revealed that the precise details of the implementation are crucial: not only did the methods span from top to bottom performers at CAFA, but also the reasons for these differences were unexpected. In this work, we also propose a new rigorous measure to compare predicted and experimental annotations. It puts more emphasis on the details of protein function than the other measures employed by CAFA and may best reflect the expectations of users. Clearly, the definition of proper goals remains one major objective for CAFA.
