Methodology article
TIM-Finder: A new method for identifying TIM-barrel proteins
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* Corresponding author: Ziding Zhang zidingzhang@cau.edu.cn
1 State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, College of Biological Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
2 National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
BMC Structural Biology 2009, 9:73 doi:10.1186/1472-6807-9-73
Published: 14 December 2009Abstract
Background
The triosephosphate isomerase (TIM)-barrel fold occurs frequently in the proteomes of different organisms, and the known TIM-barrel proteins have been found to play diverse functional roles. To accelerate the exploration of the sequence-structure protein landscape in the TIM-barrel fold, a computational tool that allows sensitive detection of TIM-barrel proteins is required.
Results
To develop a new TIM-barrel protein identification method in this work, we consider three descriptors: a sequence-alignment-based descriptor using PSI-BLAST e-values and bit scores, a descriptor based on secondary structure element alignment (SSEA), and a descriptor based on the occurrence of PROSITE functional motifs. With the assistance of Support Vector Machine (SVM), the three descriptors were combined to obtain a new method with improved performance, which we call TIM-Finder. When tested on the whole proteome of Bacillus subtilis, TIM-Finder is able to detect 194 TIM-barrel proteins at a 99% confidence level, outperforming the PSI-BLAST search as well as one existing fold recognition method.
Conclusions
TIM-Finder can serve as a competitive tool for proteome-wide TIM-barrel protein identification. The TIM-Finder web server is freely accessible at http://202.112.170.199/TIM-Finder/ webcite.