Single-stranded and double-stranded DNA-binding protein prediction using HMM profiles

Abstract

Background: DNA-binding proteins perform important roles in cellular processes and are involved in many biological activities. These proteins include crucial protein-DNA binding domains and can interact with single-stranded or double-stranded DNA, and accordingly classified as single-stranded DNA-binding proteins (SSBs) or double-stranded DNA-binding proteins (DSBs). Computational prediction of SSBs and DSBs helps in annotating protein functions and understanding of protein-binding domains. Results: Performance is reported using the DNA-binding protein dataset that was recently introduced by Wang et al., [1]. The proposed method achieved a sensitivity of 0.600, specificity of 0.792, AUC of 0.758, MCC of 0.369, accuracy of 0.744, and F-measure of 0.536, on the independent test set. Conclusion: The proposed method with the hidden Markov model (HMM) profiles for feature extraction, outperformed the benchmark method in the literature and achieved an overall improvement of approximately 3%. The source code and supplementary information of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/roneshsharma/Predict-DNA-binding-proteins/wiki.