An estimated 170 million people, approximately 3% of the world population, are chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). More than 350,000 deaths are reported annually, which are caused by HCV. HCV, similar to a variety of viruses, causes disease in humans by altering protein-protein interactions within the host cells. Experimental approaches for the detection of host-virus PPIs have many inherent limitations. Computational approaches to predict these interactions are therefore of significant importance. While many studies have been developed to predict intra-species PPIs in the last decade, predictions on inter-species PPIs such as human-HCV PPIs are rare. In this study, we developed an ensemble learning method to predict PPIs between human and HCV proteins. Our model utilises four well-established diverse learners as base classifiers including random forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). In addition, an MLP was used as a meta-learner to combine base learners' predictions to provide the final prediction. To encode human and HCV proteins as feature vectors, we used six different descriptors as follows: amino acid composition (ACC), pseudo amino acid composition (PAC), evolutionary information feature, network centrality measures, tissue information and post-translational modification information. To assess the prediction power of the proposed method, we assembled a benchmark dataset composed of confident positive and negative PPIs. In a 10-fold cross-validation experiment, our prediction method achieved accuracy and specificity as high as 83% and 94%, respectively. Furthermore, in an independent test set the proposed method achieved an accuracy of 84% and a specificity of 92%. When compared with the existing method, our method showed a better performance. These results revealed that our method is suitable for performing PPI prediction in a host-pathogen context.
Various cold-adapted organisms produce antifreeze proteins (AFPs), which prevent the freezing of cell fluids by inhibiting the growth of ice crystals. AFPs are currently being recognized in various organisms, living in extremely low temperatures. AFPs have several important applications in increasing freeze tolerance of plants, maintaining the tissue in frozen conditions and producing cold-hardy plants by applying transgenic technology. Substantial differences in the sequence and structure of the AFPs, pose a challenge for researchers to identify these proteins. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to identify AFPs, using supportive vector machine (SVM) by incorporating 4 types of features. Results of the two used benchmark datasets, revealed the strength of the proposed method in AFP prediction. According to the results of an independent test setup, our method outperformed the current state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the comparison results of the discrimination power of different feature types revealed that physicochemical descriptors are the most contributing features in AFP detection. This method has been implemented as a stand-alone tool, named afpCOOL, for various operating systems to predict AFPs with a user friendly graphical interface.
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