Pretata: predicting TATA binding proteins with novel features and dimensionality reduction strategy

Background: It is necessary and essential to discovery protein function from the novel primary sequences. Wet lab experimental procedures are not only time-consuming, but also costly, so predicting protein structure and function reliably based only on amino acid sequence has significant value. TATA-binding protein (TBP) is a kind of DNA binding protein, which plays a key role in the transcription regulation. Our study proposed an automatic approach for identifying TATA-binding proteins efficiently, accurately, and conveniently. This method would guide for the special protein identification with computational intelligence strategies.

Results: Firstly, we proposed novel fingerprint features for TBP based on pseudo amino acid composition, physicochemical properties, and secondary structure. Secondly, hierarchical features dimensionality reduction strategies were employed to improve the performance furthermore. Currently, Pretata achieves 92.92% TATA-binding protein prediction accuracy, which is better than all other existing methods.

Conclusions: The experiments demonstrate that our method could greatly improve the prediction accuracy and speed, thus allowing large-scale NGS data prediction to be practical. A web server is developed to facilitate the other researchers, which can be accessed at http://server.malab.cn/preTata/ .