Abstract
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) participate in many biological processes by interacting with other proteins, including the regulation of transcription, translation, and the cell cycle. With the increasing amount of disorder sequence data available, it is thus crucial to identify the IDP binding sites for functional annotation of these proteins. Over the decades, many computational approaches have been developed to predict protein-protein binding sites of IDP (IDP-PPIS) based on protein sequence information. Moreover, there are new IDP-PPIS predictors developed every year with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. It is thus necessary to provide an up-to-date overview of these methods in this field. In this paper, we collected 30 representative predictors published recently and summarized the databases, features and algorithms. We described the procedure how the features were generated based on public data and used for the prediction of IDP-PPIS, along with the methods to generate the feature representations. All the predictors were divided into three categories: scoring functions, machine learning-based prediction, and consensus approaches. For each category, we described the details of algorithms and their performances. Hopefully, our manuscript will not only provide a full picture of the status quo of IDP binding prediction, but also a guide for selecting different methods. More importantly, it will shed light on the inspirations for future development trends and principles.
1 Introduction
With the rapid development in the protein field, there are increasingly number of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs) identified in viruses, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes ().
IDPs lack stable tertiary structure under physiological conditions and are highly flexible compared with globular proteins (Uversky et al., 2008). Therefore, when interacting with other proteins, IDP can participate in various physiological processes (Uversky et al., 2005) including cell signal transduction and regulation through conformational changes. IDPs are also widely involved in diseases. For example, type 1 susceptible protein (BRCA1) involved in the occurrence of breast cancer participates in the interaction mainly through disordered regions (Uversky et al., 2008), and α -synuclein folds from disordered state in acidic or high temperature environment, which leads to neurodegenerative diseases (Uversky et al., 2008).
IDPs take part in protein-protein interactions through one-to-many or many-to-one mode (Uversky et al., 2008). Studies found that the protein-protein interaction in which IDP participates is often achieved through coupled folding and binding (). For example, CREB protein forms a spiral structure by binding CBP protein (Radhakrishnan et al., 1997), and the binding of p53 protein with MDM2 protein leads to the protein folding from coil to spiral (Kussie et al., 1996). It has been found that the binding of IDP with corresponding proteins will lead to the transition from disorder to order. For instance, the disordered regions of E-cadherin turn to order format after interacting with β-catenin (); the disordered protein DFF45 interacts with DFF40 to transform into an ordered state (Zhou et al., 2001); the Furin-like cleavage site exists at the S1/S2 junction of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike (FLCSSpike), and the “disorder-to-order transition” of Spike-Furin complex has been found (Roy et al., 2022). In addition, some ordered proteins interacting with other molecules leads to the unfolding of self-inhibiting domains and activates biological functions (Uversky, 2013). All these examples above show that protein interaction sites play an important role in the transition between disordered protein and ordered protein.
The identification of protein-protein interaction sites is a key to deciphering the functional relationship between proteins and biological processes, which is one of the most important tasks for both experimental and computational approaches. The commonly used experimental methods to pinpoint binding sites in disordered proteins include nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and non-equilibrium transient kinetic techniques (Mollica et al., 2016). NMR identifies binding sites through the changes in chemical shifts and residual dipole coupling (RDC) caused by changes in the magnetic environment during binding (Jensen et al., 2011); non-equilibrium transient kinetic technique refers to identifying binding sites by measuring the changes in optical signals that occur during the binding process of disordered proteins (Mollica et al., 2016). Large efforts have also been devoted to gaining a better knowledge of disordered protein interactions by high throughput methodologies through amino acid substitutions, such as binding energetics study in CcdA (), mutational studies in c-Myb (), ACTR (transcriptional co-activator for thyroid hormone and retinoid receptors) (), NCBD domain of CBP (CREB binding protein) (), Hif 1α (hypoxia inducible factor 1α) (Lindström et al., 2018) as well as MazE6 antitoxin (). These studies greatly contributed to obtaining a thorough understanding of disordered protein interactions.
Besides the experiment methods, there are a series of computational approaches developed for IDP protein interaction sites (IDP-PPIS) prediction such as MoRFpred (), SLiMPred (Mooney et al., 2012), ANCHOR (; Mészáros et al., 2009) and SPINE-D (Zhang et al., 2013). With the increasing amount of disordered protein data available, computational approaches to predict IDP-PPIS are becoming more and more important to aid the expensive and time-consuming experiments to annotate the functional properties of disordered proteins. Predictors on IDP-PPIS are mainly designed for predicting several sub-types of disorder binding sites including molecular recognition features (MoRFs), short linear motifs (SLiMs), disordered protein-binding regions (DPBRs), and semi-disordered regions (Katuwawala et al., 2019b). Molecular recognition features (MoRFs) are short disordered fragments involved in state transitions through four types (α-MoRFs, β-MoRFs, ι-MoRFs and complex-MoRFs) during disordered protein binding activities (Mohan et al., 2006). Short linear motifs (SLiMs) are short disordered protein fragments that bind to the structural domains of proteins, consisting of 3–10 amino acid residues, and the disordered binding regions operated by SLiMs and MoRFs are highly overlapping (Mooney et al., 2012; Weatheritt and Gibson, 2012). Disordered protein-binding regions (DPBRs) are more general binding fragments that include not only short binding regions but also longer fragments (Katuwawala et al., 2019b). Semi-disordered regions refer to regions with a 50% probability of being predicted to be disordered regions, and its functional properties can be used to further predict MoRFs (Katuwawala et al., 2019b).
There are several review articles (Katuwawala et al., 2019a; Katuwawala et al., 2019b) on the predictors of IDP-PPIS have been published previously, but most lack systematic descriptions of the factors affecting the performance of the predictors. Moreover, it is time to conclude the latest predictors due to the rapid update of the IDP interaction site predictors. For these purposes, we select 30 predictors of IDP-PPIS published up to January 2022 and provide a comprehensive description of the database, features, and algorithms used in the predictor construction process. This paper gives a detailed overview of the status of the predictors of IDP-PPIS and thus provides new insights and inspiration for the development and application of new computational approaches.
2 Overview of the predictors of intrinsically disordered protein-protein interaction sites
Figure 1 illustrates the common scheme for developing an IDP-PPIS predictor. Firstly, datasets are curated and selected from large databases and/or published papers. Then, features are extracted from protein sequences using different methods. Then, different algorithms are applied to train and optimize the predictors to output a real-valued amino acid propensity score or binary prediction. Here, we classify the predictors into three categories based on the algorithms used: scoring functions, machine learning-based methods, and consensus-based approaches.
FIGURE 1
2.1 Databases
From Figure 1, the first key aspect of developing the predictor is the selection of a sufficient amount of high-quality data in a standardized format. We present databases widely used in predictors and describes some relevant databases.
The Database of Protein Disorder (DisProt) (Sickmeier et al., 2007) is the first public available database on IDPs and IDRs which includes experimentally annotated information on multiple types of proteins. DisProt is one of the common databases for IDP-PPIS predictors, and the latest version is DisProt 9, covering more than 2000 proteins and nearly 5,000 functional annotations (Quaglia et al., 2021). DisProt is available at https://www.disprot.org/.
Disordered protein regions are often characterized by the missing electron density found by X-ray (
The missing annotations are related to the inherently disordered protein regions. Several methods implemented UniProt (
Intrinsically Disordered proteins with Extensive Annotations and Literature (IDEAL) (
The Disordered Binding Site (DIBS) (Schad et al., 2017) is a large database storing disordered protein complexes, primarily in combination with ordered proteins. The synthesized information provided on protein interactions is an important resource for studying binding sites. DIBS is available at http://dibs.enzim.ttk.mta.hu/.
The Eukaryotic Linear Motif (ELM) (
MobiDB (Piovesan et al., 2020) is a database of IDPs commonly used by predictors, forming four-level annotations of ' CDHP ' (curated, derived, homology, prediction) by connecting other databases and applying various tools. The latest version is MobiDB 4.1, which contains more than 200 million proteins. MobiDB is available at http://mobidb.bio.unipd.it/.
The Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) (
There are some relevant and commonly used databases such as Database of Disordered Protein Prediction (D2P2) and Mutual Folding Induced by Binding (MFIB). D2P2 (Oates et al., 2012) is a database for disorder and SCOP domain prediction and annotation of over 10 million protein sequences by multiple predictors. D2P2 is more commonly used for the study of protein disorder and structural relationships. D2P2 is available at http://d2p2.pro.
MFIB (
2.2 Features
The second critical part of constructing predictors is to obtain representative features of disordered protein sequences. Features integrated by the predictor determine the accuracy of distinguishing between IDP protein sites and general amino acid residues. In IDP-PPIS prediction, the most widely used features include amino acid compositions, predicted structural features, disorder scores, physicochemical properties, evolutionary information, and other features. We summarize these features and tools to generate these features in Table 1.
TABLE 1
| Categories | Features | Tools to calculate | References of the tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amino acid composition | Amino acid composition | Wang et al. (2017) | |
| Predicted structural features | Secondary structure | PSIPRED & GOR-I & SPIDER2 & SPOT-1D & Porte | |
| Accessible surface area | SPIDER2 & SPOT-1D & EDTSurf | Xu and Zhang, (2009); | |
| Backbone angle | SPIDER2 & SPOT-1D | ||
| Hemispheric exposure | SPIDER2 & SPOT-1D | ||
| Contact numbers | SPIDER2 & SPOT-1D | ||
| B-factor | ProDy & PROFbval | Schlessinger et al. (2006); Wong and Gsponer, (2019b) | |
| Structural motifs | BRNN | Mooney et al. (2006) | |
| Disorder scores | Disorder scores | IUPred & Espritz & VSL2 & DISOPRED2 & DISOclust & MFDp | Ward et al. (2004); |
| Physicochemical properties | Physicochemical properties | AAindex database | Kawashima et al. (2007) |
| Evolutionary information | Position-Specific Scoring Matrix | PSI-BLAST | |
| Bigram feature | |||
| Hidden Markov Model | HHblits | Remmert et al. (2011) | |
| Shannon entropy | |||
| Other features | The length and location of IDR | ||
| Sequence complexity | SEG algorithm | Peng and Kurgan, (2015) |
Common features of intrinsically disordered protein-protein interaction sites predictors.
2.2.1 Amino acid composition
Amino acid composition (AAC) is the proportion of a particular amino acid in the whole protein sequence. The amino acid compositions are distinct among IDR, MoRF, flanking regions and other protein regions. It is reported that there are more Ile, Leu, Phe, Tyr, Lys, Arg and Asp enriched and less Ala and Gly comparing with the normal regions. Meanwhile, the flanking region includes more Ala, Gly, Glu, Ser and Thr which turns to promote disorder (
AAC could be calculated by the formula (Wang et al., 2017): . is a particular amino acid; is the number of a particular amino acid; is the total number of amino acids in the protein sequence.
2.2.2 Predicted structural features
The rapid structural transformation of disordered proteins during binding (Uversky and Dunker, 2010) suggests that the predicted structural characteristics of disordered proteins can improve the accuracy of binding site prediction. Commonly used predicted structural features are: secondary structure, structural motif, solvent accessible surface area, contact number, hemispheric exposure, backbone angle, and B-factor.
Molecular recognition feature (MoRF) and short linear motif (SLim) are involved in protein-protein interaction as a secondary structure element (Oldfield et al., 2005;
The biophysical properties of disordered protein change during protein interaction which could be used for IDP-PPIS prediction. For instance, protein-protein interactions are mainly achieved through surface contact, and when the protein state is transformed, the Accessible surface area (ASA) of contact area changes as well, which helps us to identify the binding site (
2.2.3 Disorder scores
Disorder propensity is an important feature for predicting disordered protein binding sites (
2.2.4 Physicochemical properties
The structure and function of proteins are affected by the physicochemical properties of amino acids. Disordered proteins are more hydrophobic than ordered proteins, and disordered binding sites can be predicted by an increase in the hydrophobicity (Mészáros et al., 2007). MoRF and linear motifs have more net charge compared to surrounding protein fragments (
The physicochemical properties of amino acids can be obtained from the AAindex database (Kawashima et al., 2007). The physicochemical and biochemical indexes of amino acids and amino acid pairs in the AAindex database are derived from published literature, which includes three parts amino acid index, substitution matrix and contact potential. In addition, if a protein sequence has similar average amino acid index with MoRF sequence, it suggests that the protein sequence is MoRF (Malhis and Gsponer, 2015). The common physicochemical properties of amino acids include hydrophobicity, polarity, polarizability, charge, aliphatic, aromatics, etc (
2.2.5 Evolutionary information
Some studies show that the evolution speed of disordered regions is often faster than other parts of proteins (
Protein evolutionary information is often obtained through position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM), hidden Markov model (HMM) profiles and Information entropy. To improve prediction performance, certain studies use modified PSSM to enhance the sequence conservation signal, such as MFSPSSMpred (
It is shown that using bigram to extract evolutionary features in natural language processing can reduce redundant features (Sharma et al., 2013), and also extract local evolutionary features for the identification of protein folding process (Lyons et al., 2015). Bigram is also an important feature for identifying IDP-PPIS.
Protein conservation is closely related to its structure and function, and the average Shannon entropy is used as a characteristic of general conservatism in protein. Some studies have used relative entropy to improve the prediction of protein functional sites (Wang and Samudrala, 2006), and Shannon entropy was also applied by (
2.2.6 Other features
The length and location of IDRs correlate with general protein functional classes. Lobley et al. (2007) identified short disordered fragments involved in protein interactions in the mid to N-terminal region of GTPase regulatory proteins. FFPred (Minneci et al., 2013) used this feature to predict the biological functions of unknown proteins. Therefore, applying the length and location features of IDRs can improve the prediction accuracy of IDP binding sites.
Compared with the ordered protein, the sequence complexity of the disordered protein is lower (Romero et al., 2000), so the sequence complexity may be an important feature to identify the binding site of IDP. SEG algorithm (Peng and Kurgan, 2015) is mainly used to calculate the complexity of protein sequence.
2.3 Algorithms
Algorithm is essential to take the features as input and predict the IDP-PPIS, which is the core element for each predictor. We summarize main information about 30 predictors for IDP-PPIS prediction in Table 2. In this paper, these predictors are classified into three categories according to algorithms: scoring function based, machine-learning based and consensus, and we selectively describe the most representative predictors.
TABLE 2
| Categories | Years | Predictors | References | Algorithms | Databases | Features | Performance | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scoring function based | 2010 | retro-MoRFs | Xue et al. (2010b) | Sequence alignment | RNase E and p53 and SRC-3 and SwissProt and PDB | Disorder scores and Sequence similarity | Not Available | Not Available |
| 2009 | ANCHOR | Energy estimation | Disprot and PDB | Pairwise interaction energy | Accuracy 0.67 | http://anchor.elte.hu/ | ||
| 2018 | ANCHOR2 | Mészáros et al. (2018) | Energy estimation | DisProt and PDB and UniProt and DIBS | Pairwise interaction energy | AUC 0.901 | http://iupred2a.elte.hu | |
| Machine-learning based | 2012 | MoRFpred | SVM | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | B-factors and ASA and Disorder scores and Physicochemical properties and PSSM | AUC 0.697 | http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/MoRFpred/ | |
| 2013 | MFSPSSMpred | SVM | PDB and UniProt and Published literature | AAC and PSSM | AUC 0.758 | Not Available | ||
| 2014 | DISOPRED3 | Jones and Cozzetto, (2014) | SVM | DisProt and PDB and UniProt | AAC and PSSM and The length and location of IDR | MCC 0.126 | http://bioinf.cs.ucl.ac.uk/disopred | |
| 2015 | MoRFCHiBi | Malhis and Gsponer, (2015) | SVM | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | AAC and Physicochemical properties | AUC 0.770 | https://morf.msl.ubc.ca/index.xhtml | |
| 2016 | MoRFCHiBiLight | Malhis et al. (2016) | Bayes rule | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | Disorder scores and Physicochemical properties | AUC 0.868 | http://www.chibi.ubc.ca/faculty/joerg-gsponer/gsponer-lab/software/morf_chibi/ | |
| 2016 | MoRFCHiBiWeb | Malhis et al. (2016) | Bayes rule | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | Disorder scores and Physicochemical properties and PSSM | AUC 0.894 | http://www.chibi.ubc.ca/faculty/joerg-gsponer/gsponer-lab/software/morf_chibi/ | |
| 2016 | fMoRFpred | Yan et al. (2016) | SVM | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | AAC and SS and Disorder scores and Physicochemical properties | AUC 0.59–0.67 | http://biomine.ece.ualberta.ca/fMoRFpred/ | |
| 2016 | Predict-MoRFs | Sharma et al. (2016) | SVM | PDB and UniProt | HMM | AUC 0.702 | https://github.com/roneshsharma/Predict-MoRFs | |
| 2016 | PSSMpred | SVM | Disprot and PDB and UniProtKB and ELM | PSSM | AUC 0.758 | http://centos.sdutacm.org/fang/SLiMPed.php | ||
| 2017 | Yu et al | Wang et al. (2017) | SVM | PDB and UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot | AAC and SS and ASA and Physicochemical properties and KNN score | AUC 0.9679 | Not Available | |
| 2018 | Fang et al | SVM | PDB and UniProt | PSSM | AUC 0.713 | Not Available | ||
| 2018 | MoRFPred-plus | Sharma et al. (2018a) | SVM | DisProt and PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | Physicochemical properties and HMM | AUC 0.821 | https://github.com/roneshsharma/MoRFpred-plus/wiki/MoRFpred-plus:-Download | |
| 2007 | alpha-MoRFpred | Feed-forward neural networks | PDB and SwissProt | SS and Disorder scores and Physiochemical properties and Shannon’s entropy | Sensitivity 0.87 | Not Available | ||
| Specificity 0.87 | ||||||||
| Accuracy 0.87 | ||||||||
| 2012 | SLiMPred | Mooney et al. (2012) | BRNN | Disprot and PDB and UniProtKB and ELM | SS and Structural motifs and ASA and Disorder scores | AUC 0.69 | http://bioware.ucd.ie | |
| 2013 | PepBindPred | Khan et al. (2013) | BRNN | ELM and SCOP | SS and Disorder scores and Vina score | AUC 0.75 | http://bioware.ucd.ie/pepbindpred | |
| 2013 | SPINE-D | Zhang et al. (2013) | Neural-network | DisProt | SS and ASA | MCC 0.15 | http://sparks-lab.org | |
| 2016 | SPOT-Disorder | LSTM | Disprot and PDB and UniProt | SS and Backbone angles and HSE and CN and ASA and Physicochemical properties and PSSM and Shannon entropy | MCC 0.309 | http://sparks-lab.org/server/SPOT-disorder/ | ||
| 2019 | SPOT-Disorder2 | LSTM | DisProt and PDB and UniProt and MobiDB | SS and Backbone angles and HSE and CN and ASA and PSSM and HMM | MCC 0.155 | https://sparks-lab.org/server/spot-disorder2/ | ||
| 2021 | DeepDISOBind | Zhang et al. (2021) | Multi-task deep neural network | DisProt | SS and RAAPs | AUC 0.771 | https://www.csuligroup.com/DeepDISOBind/ | |
| 2021 | flDPnn | Hu et al. (2021) | RF and Feedforward neural network | DisProt | SS and Disorder scores and PSSM | AUC 0.79 | http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/flDPnn/ | |
| 2015 | DisoRDPbind | Peng and Kurgan, (2015); Peng et al. (2016) | Logistic regression | DisProt | AAC and SS and Disorder scores and Physiochemical properties and Sequence complexity | AUC 0.62–0.72 | http://biomine.ece.ualberta.ca/DisoRDPbind/ | |
| 2019 | IDRBind | Wong and Gsponer, (2019b) | Gradient boosted trees and CRF | PDB and IDEAL and peptiDB and Docking Benchmark 5 and Published literature | AAC and B-factors and ASA and Physicochemical properties and PSSM | MCC 0.31 | https://idrbind.msl.ubc.ca/ | |
| Consensus | 2018 | OPAL | Sharma et al. (2018b) | Integrating predictors | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | SS and Backbone angles and HSE and ASA and Physiochemical properties | AUC 0.795–0.870 | http://www.alok-ai-lab.com/tools/opal/ |
| 2018 | OPAL+ | Sharma et al. (2018c) | Integrating predictors | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | SS and Backbone angles and HSE and ASA and Physicochemical properties and HMM and Bigram feature vectors | AUC 0.820–0.876 | http://www.alok-ai-lab.com/tools/opal_plus/ | |
| 2019 | Sharma et al | Sharma et al. (2019) | Integrating predictors | PDB and UniProtKB and Published literature | SS and Backbone angles and HSE and CN and ASA and Physicochemical properties | AUC 0.797–0.881 | https://github.com/roneshsharma/BMC_Models2018/wiki | |
| 2020 | HybridPBRpred | Zhang et al. (2020) | Integrating predictors | DisProt and PDB | AAC and SS and ASA and Disorder scores and Physiochemical properties and HHM and RAAP | AUC 0.795 | http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/hybridPBRpred/ | |
| 2020 | DEPICTER | Integrating predictors | DisProt and PDB | AAC and SS and Disorder scores and Physiochemical properties and Sequence complexity and Pairwise interaction energy | AUC 0.87 | http://biomine.cs.vcu.edu/servers/DEPICTER/ |
Summary of intrinsically disordered protein-protein interaction sites predictors.
2.3.1 Scoring function based
The scoring function method is widely used in the evaluation of protein interaction (Liu and Wang, 2015). Its principle is to obtain the final prediction results by scoring the protein binding ability with various functions (Liu and Wang, 2015). This paper mainly introduces retro-MoRFs based on sequence alignment and ANCHOR series predictors based on paired energy estimation method to predict IDP-PPIS.
2.3.1.1 Sequence alignment
Sequence alignment is a commonly used tool to predict the structural and functional properties of proteins (
2.3.1.2 Energy estimation
ANCHOR (
The algorithm of the ANCHOR can be expressed as: represents the final predicted score for residue k, which is converted to a probability value as the final output. corresponds to criterion 1, and the mean IUPred scores of the neighbors with the -th amino acid in a window range are calculated, so that the disorder trend of the neighborhood with the -th amino acid is obtained. is the possible interaction energy of the -th residue through forming intrachain contact. is the energy that the residue might gain by interacting with a hypothetical globular protein.
On the basis of ANCHOR (
The new function is defined as follows:
Here, represents the score of the residue , represents the energy calculated only by binding to ordered proteins. is the average IUPred score of the half-window continuous neighborhood of residue , and represent the parameters of the minimum energy gain and the minimum average disorder tendency, which make the residues become IDDP-PPIS.
2.3.2 Machine-learning based
From Table 2, we can observe that more than two third of the predictors are based on machine learning. These types of methods usually integrate multiple features derived from the protein sequence information into the model, and use a variety of machine learning algorithms to train the predictors and predict the IDP-PPIS. The prediction results include the binding site propensity score and binary classification prediction. Our collection of machine learning-based predictors mainly uses support vector machines (SVM) (
2.3.2.1 Support vector machine
Support vector machine (SVM) (
MoRFpred (
Due to the slow running speed of MoRFpred for large-scale prediction (Yan et al., 2016), developed a fMoRFpred predictor using SVM method to identify MoRF in 2016. fMoRFpred used the data set of MoRFpred, but selected a larger number of feature sets such as predicted disordered region and secondary structure, and the features of a smaller sliding window to improve the performances. Meanwhile, fMoRFpred also used only high-throughput disordered predictors and secondary structure to speed up the computing. The SVM model used by fMoRFpred chose the default parameter , and the PPR of fMoRFpred is close to 1, which is better than MoRFpred. In addition, running time analysis shows that fMoRFpred runs faster than MoRFpred.
MFSPSSMpred (
In 2016 (
DISOPRED3 (Jones and Cozzetto, 2014) used amino acid composition, PSSM obtained by PSI-BLAST and the length and location of IDR to apply an SVM classifier with an RBF kernel to predict protein binding sites. DISOPRED3 performs well with an MCC of 0.126.
MoRFCHiBi (Malhis and Gsponer, 2015) trained SVMS and SVMT models of Sigmoid and Radial Basis Function (RBF) Gaussian kernels using the physicochemical properties of amino acids. MoRFCHiBi predicts MoRF by integrating the results of both models with the help of Bayesian rules. It employed SVMS to predict MoRF propensity based on component comparison information and SVMT to predict MoRF propensity based on similarity information. MoRFCHiBi performs better than other predictors with the highest AUC of 0.770 but slower than ANCHOR.
MoRFCHiBiLight (Malhis et al., 2016) used Bayes rules to combine MoRFCHiBi with ESpritz’s (Walsh et al., 2011) disordered prediction results to obtain the final MoRF propensity score. MoRFCHiBiLight performs better than MoRFCHiBi with a maximum AUC of 0.868.
MoRFCHiBiWeb (Malhis et al., 2015; Malhis et al., 2016) predicts MoRF using Bayes rules combining the MoRFCHiBi and MoRFDC predictors (Malhis et al., 2015). MoRFDC used Bayes rules to integrate disorder scores and the conservativeness scores obtained by PSI-BLAST. The AUC of MoRFCHiBiWeb is up to 0.894.
Predict-MoRFs (Sharma et al., 2016) is the first predictor to predict MoRFs using protein sequence evolution information obtained from HMM profiles, and applied SVM with both radial basis function (RBF) and sigmoid kernels to calculate amino acid residue propensity scores. Predict-MoRFs outperformed other predictors with an AUC of 0.702. Since Predict-MoRFs uses the HHblits method (Remmert et al., 2011) to extract the information of the HMM, it runs faster than MoRFpred.
Later in 2018 (Sharma et al., 2018a), improved the Predict-MoRFs and named as MoRFPred-plus. MoRFPred-plus combines HMM profiles and the feature of physicochemical properties of amino acids by applying SVM models with two kernels, radial basis function (RBF) and sigmoid, to obtain final prediction results. The prediction results are better than other predictors, with a maximum AUC of 0.821.
2.3.2.2 Logistic regression
Logistic regression (Li et al., 1999) is a probabilistic classification algorithm, which has the advantages of short running time and high prediction performance, and is widely used in binary classification problems such as predicting protein disorder and ordered protein-protein interaction (Lin et al., 2004). DisoRDPbind (Peng and Kurgan, 2015) used this method to predict IDP-PPIS.
DisoRDPbind (Peng and Kurgan, 2015) input the features extracted from the protein sequences into a logistic regression model to obtain a propensity score for protein residues involved in disordered RNA, DNA, and protein binding, which was then combined with sequence comparison annotations to obtain a final propensity score. Regression coefficients for the input features in the logistic regression model are determined by the ridge. DisoRDPbind performs well with the AUC from 0.62 to 0.72.
2.3.2.3 Gradient boosted trees and conditional random field models
IDRBind (Wong and Gsponer, 2019a) predicted the binding sites of disordered proteins by combining gradient ascending tree and conditional random field model. IDRBind first used XGBoost from R packet (
Gradient boosting tree performs well in solving classification problems, which can be implemented by R package XGBoost (
2.3.2.4 Random forest
The random forest (RF) model (
FlDPnn (Hu et al., 2021) used multiple machine learning models to extract predicted feature sets about disorder and disorder function, then applied the disorder feature set to train deep feedforward neural networks to better predict disorder, and finally used a random forest model to combine the disorder function features extracted from the machine learning models and the disorder features obtained from the deep feedforward neural networks to predict the protein binding sites of IDP. flDPnn performs better than other predictors with an AUC of 0.79.
2.3.2.5 Neural network
Neural network is widely used in the study of protein-protein interaction. In this paper, we introduce five types of neural network models: Feedforward neural network (Zell, 1994), Bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) (Mooney et al., 2012), Two-hidden layer neural network (
Feedforward neural networks (Zell, 1994; Sazli, 2006) are artificial neural networks in which information is transmitted unidirectionally from the input layer to the output layer via a hidden layer. They are classified into single-layer and multi-layer feedforward neural networks according to the presence or absence of hidden layers and are trained using a back propagation algorithm. Alpha-MoRFpred (
Alpha-MoRFpred (
Bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) was applied to predict IDP-PPIS by SLiMPred (Mooney et al., 2012) and PepBindPred (Khan et al., 2013). BRNN (Schuster and Paliwal, 1997) was to obtain sequence information from the opposite direction to the output layer, that is, to predict disordered protein binding sites using the context information of protein sequences. Due to its recursive nature, BRNN had fewer free parameters.
The architecture of BRNN (Mooney et al., 2012; Khan et al., 2013):
where and are the input and output of the neural network at position , respectively. and are the forward and backward chains of hidden vectors with ., and represent the output update, forward update and backward update functions respectively, which are parameterized by three two-layer feedforward neural networks.
SLiMPred (Mooney et al., 2012) applied BRNN to predict SLiMs using information on predicted secondary structure, structural motifs, solvent accessibility, and disorder prediction. The AUC was 0.69. Khan et al. (2013) developed another predictor for SLiMs, PepBindPred, which applied BRNN to predict SLiMs using information on sequence, predicted secondary structure, disorder scores, and Vina score. Adding Vina score improves the predictor performance. PepBindPred performed well with the AUC of 0.75.
SPINE-D (
Two-hidden layer neural network architecture used by SPINE-D (
Calculation formula of output result of the hidden layers:
Where represent the input to the neural network, The first hidden layer contains neurons and the second hidden layer contains neurons. is the activation function, are the neural network weights that connect the neurons in the input and the first hidden layer, are the neural network weights that connect the neurons in the first and second hidden layer.
The training process of a neural network is to compare the output results, , with known values to calculate the sum square error (e.g., angle):
Error, , optimization by steepest gradient descent method:where is the learning rate.
Both SPOT-Disorder (
SPOT-Disorder (
The neural network structure of SPOT-Disorder2 (
Based on the information derived from protein sequences, DeepDISOBind (Zhang et al., 2021) applied multi-task deep neural network to accurately predict the binding regions of disordered protein with DNA, RNA and protein. DeepDISOBind included shared layer, nucleic acid binding layer, protein binding layer, DNA binding layer and RNA binding layer. Various sequence feature would be input into a shared layer, which is compose of four different kernel convolutional neural network (CNN) and feedforward neural network (FNN) modules. The shared layer is connected to the protein-binding layer and the nucleic acid-binding layer. The nucleic acid-binding layer is connected to the DNA-binding layer and the RNA-binding layer. The output layer consists of three neurons using sigmoid transfer function, and finally the interaction propensity of disordered protein with RNA, DNA and protein is obtained. For IDP-PPIS prediction, DeepDISOBind outperformed other predictors with an AUC of 0.771.
2.3.3 Consensus
Consensus-based predictor (
OPAL (Sharma et al., 2018b) is a consensus predictor that combined two predictors, PROMIS (Sharma et al., 2018b) and MoRFCHiBi, to obtain the MoRF propensity score using the simple average method. The MoRFCHiBi predictor is described in detail above. The average method is the sum of the scores of all SVM models divided by the number of models used. The OPAL predictor performs well with an AUC of 0.795–0.870.
Sharma et al. (2018c) also developed the OPAL + predictor in 2018, which is an enhanced version of OPAL. OPAL + combined four independent SVM models with radial basis function (RBF) kernel for different length amino acid residues with MoRFpred-plus and MoRFCHiBi to obtain the final MoRF propensity score by average method. OPAL + performed better than other predictors with AUC of 0.820–0.876.
Another consensus-based predictor was also constructed by Sharma et al. (2019). Using the structural information obtained from the protein sequence, two independent SVM models with radial basis function (RBF) as the kernel were used to predict the MoRF located in the terminal and in the middle, respectively. Combined with the prediction scores of the two models, the final MoRF propensity score was obtained with AUCs 0.729–0.864. Then, the predictor was combined with MoRFpred-plus, PROMIS and MoRFCHiBi to form a consensus predictor that can obtain sequence information from different aspects and combine different algorithms. The final MoRF propensity score was obtained by averaging the scores of each predictor. The consensus predictor performs better than other predictors with AUC of 0.797–0.881.
DEPICTER (
The most recent consensus predictor HybridPBRpred (Zhang et al., 2020) combined the predictions of DisoRDPbind trained on disordered annotated data and the predictor SCRIBER trained on structured data to predict different types of protein binding residues. HybridPBRpred first normalized the scores of each predictor to [-1, 1], and for binary prediction, the prediction is protein binding residue score >0 otherwise score <0. Then, the final score was obtained in the following way: if at least one predictor predicts the residue to be a protein-binding residue, the higher score is chosen as the final score; if both predictors predict a non-protein-binding residue, the average of the two scores is used as the final score. The consensus predictor HybridPBRpred has improved IDP-PPIS prediction compared to non-consensus predictors with an AUC of 0.795.
3 Discussion
Disorder proteins lack stable structures but have many important functions through protein-protein interactions. There are a large number of studies have focused on identifying the protein binding sites of disordered proteins which will provide better functional annotations of disorder proteins. We scanned the literature since the publication of alpha-MoRFpred in 2007 and found that there has been a sharp increase in protein-binding IDR predictors, with 6–10 new predictors published every 3 years. These predictors continuously improve the prediction performance by applying different algorithms, screening more representative features or combining multiple models, and so on. The AUC is increased from 0.6 to 0.9. However, there might be still some limitations for current methods which can be improved from several directions.
We found that the existing predictors mainly curated the datasets from two large databases Disprot and PDB, especially there are many predictors on MoRF using the high-quality dataset from Disfani et al. Since this dataset contains a large number of immune-related proteins (
In addition, most of the existing predictors are trained only for disordered protein data, but HybridPBRpred expands the benchmark dataset by combining predictors trained from structured protein datasets, allowing the predictors to improve the prediction performance in terms of protein binding sites for disordered proteins. There might be some common properties shared by different types of protein interfaces (Hou et al., 2017;
The existing predictors mainly focus on short binding regions such as MoRF (
Salt bridges involved in disordered proteins have not yet been considered as a feature in all the predictors summarized. When disordered proteins participate in protein-protein interactions, ionic bonds are formed between oppositely charged amino acid side-chains, i.e., salt bridges. Studies (
Since disordered proteins lack stable tertiary structures, most existing predictors are developed based on sequences, but disordered proteins still retain structural conformational properties such as secondary structure features, and it has been pointed out that transient secondary structure pre-structured motifs (PreSMos) (Kim and Han, 2021) exist in intrinsic disordered proteins and are involved in the development of various diseases by binding to corresponding targets. Furthermore, with the rapid development of structure prediction technology in the protein field, disorder predictors constructed based on AlphaFold2 (Wilson et al., 2022) structures were found to have potentials to identify disordered regions. Alphafold2 and RoseTTAFold have been successfully used to predict the structure of protein complexes (
4 Conclusion
In this paper, we collected 30 predictors related to IDP-PPIS published up to January 2022, and described them in terms of three key aspects of the predictor construction process: databases, features, and algorithms. By summarizing the advantages and disadvantages of the existing predictors, we believe that the development of more comprehensive protein-binding site predictors by expanding the data sources, applying the features related to structural changes and binding to ordered protein-binding site predictors may further improve the performance of IDP-PPIS in the near future. In addition, since disordered proteins are involved in a variety of important physiological and biochemical processes using protein-protein interactions in various organisms, we also hope our review will help researchers to gain new ideas for solving various disease problems mediated by disordered proteins.
Statements
Author contributions
Conceptualization, RC, XL, and YY; methodology XL, RC, and XS; writing—original draft preparation, RC, XL, and YY; writing—review and editing, CW, RC, XL, and XS; supervision, project administration CW, DQ; funding acquisition, CW and DQ. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
CW was supported by the Young Scholars Program of Shandong University (21,320,082,164,070). DQ was supported by Shandong Province Key R&D Program (2021SFGC0504).
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all those who have helped this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
References
1
AkdelM.PiresD. E. V.Porta PardoE.JänesJ.ZalevskyA. O.MészárosB.et al (2021). A structural biology community assessment of AlphaFold 2 applications. bioRxiv. 10.1101/2021.09.26.461876
2
AltschulS. (1997). Gapped BLAST and PSI-blast: A new generation of protein database search programs. Nucleic Acids Res.25 (17), 3389–3402. 10.1093/nar/25.17.3389
3
AndreevaA.KuleshaE.GoughJ.MurzinA. G. (2019). The SCOP database in 2020: Expanded classification of representative family and superfamily domains of known protein structures. Nucleic Acids Res.48 (D1), D376–D382. 10.1093/nar/gkz1064
4
ApweilerR.MartinM. J.O'DonovanC.MagraneM.Alam-FaruqueY.AntunesR.et al (2010). The universal protein resource (UniProt) in 2010. Nucleic Acids Res.38, D142–D148. 10.1093/nar/gkp846
5
BarikA.KatuwawalaA.HansonJ.PaliwalK.ZhouY.KurganL. (2020). Depicter: Intrinsic disorder and disorder function prediction server. J. Mol. Biol.432 (11), 3379–3387. 10.1016/j.jmb.2019.12.030
6
BasuS.BiswasP. (2018). Salt-bridge dynamics in intrinsically disordered proteins: A trade-off between electrostatic interactions and structural flexibility. Biochimica Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Proteins Proteomics1866 (5-6), 624–641. 10.1016/j.bbapap.2018.03.002
7
BasuS.SöderquistF.WallnerB. (2017). Proteus: A random forest classifier to predict disorder-to-order transitioning binding regions in intrinsically disordered proteins. J. Comput. Aided Mol. Des.31 (5), 453–466. 10.1007/s10822-017-0020-y
8
BatemanA.MartinM-J.OrchardS.MagraneM.AgivetovaR.AhmadS.et al (2021). UniProt: The universal protein knowledgebase in 2021. Nucleic Acids Res.49 (D1), D480–D489. 10.1093/nar/gkaa1100
9
BrownC. J.TakayamaS.CampenA. M.ViseP.MarshallT. W.OldfieldC. J.et al (2002). Evolutionary rate heterogeneity in proteins with long disordered regions. J. Mol. Evol.55 (1), 104–110. 10.1007/s00239-001-2309-6
10
BryantP.PozzatiG.ElofssonA. (2022). Improved prediction of protein-protein interactions using AlphaFold2. Nat. Commun.13 (1). 10.1038/s41467-022-28865-w
11
BurleyS. K.BermanH. M.BhikadiyaC.BiC.ChenL.CostanzoL. D.et al (2018). Protein Data Bank: The single global archive for 3D macromolecular structure data. Nucleic Acids Res.47 (D1), D520–D528. 10.1093/nar/gky949
12
ChandraS.ChattopadhyayG.VaradarajanR. (2021). Rapid identification of secondary structure and binding site residues in an intrinsically disordered protein segment. Front. Genet.12. 10.3389/fgene.2021.755292
13
ChandraS.ManjunathK.AshokA.VaradarajanR. (2022) Inferring bound structure and residue specific contributions to binding energetics in the Intrinsically Disordered Protein, CcdA. bioRxiv. DOI: doi:10.1101/2022.04.08.487678
14
ChangC-C.LinC-J. (2011). Libsvm. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol.2 (3), 1–27. 10.1145/1961189.1961199
15
ChenT.GuestrinC. (2016). “XGBoost,” in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, (ACM). 10.1145/2939672.2939785
16
ChengY.OldfieldC. J.MengJ.RomeroP.UverskyV. N.DunkerA. K. (2007). Mining α-helix-forming molecular recognition features with cross species sequence alignments. Biochemistry46 (47), 13468–13477. 10.1021/bi7012273
17
DaveyN. E.CowanJ. L.ShieldsD. C.GibsonT. J.ColdwellM. J.EdwardsR. J. (2012a). SLiMPrints: Conservation-based discovery of functional motif fingerprints in intrinsically disordered protein regions. Nucleic Acids Res.40 (21), 10628–10641. 10.1093/nar/gks854
18
DaveyN. E.Van RoeyK.WeatherittR. J.ToedtG.UyarB.AltenbergB.et al (2012b). Attributes of short linear motifs. Mol. Biosyst.8 (1), 268–281. 10.1039/c1mb05231d
19
DeForteS.UverskyV. N. (2016). Resolving the ambiguity: Making sense of intrinsic disorder when PDB structures disagree. Protein Sci.25 (3), 676–688. 10.1002/pro.2864
20
DinkelH.MichaelS.WeatherittR. J.DaveyN. E.Van RoeyK.AltenbergB.et al (2011). ELM--the database of eukaryotic linear motifs. Nucleic Acids Res.40 (D1), D242–D251. 10.1093/nar/gkr1064
21
DisfaniF. M.HsuW-L.MiziantyM. J.OldfieldC. J.XueB.DunkerA. K.et al (2012). MoRFpred, a computational tool for sequence-based prediction and characterization of short disorder-to-order transitioning binding regions in proteins. BIOINFORMATICS28 (12), I75–I83. 10.1093/bioinformatics/bts209
22
DoganJ.MuX.EngströmÅ.JemthP. (2013). The transition state structure for coupled binding and folding of disordered protein domains. Sci. Rep.3 (1). 10.1038/srep02076
23
DosztanyiZ.CsizmokV.TompaP.SimonI. (2005). IUPred: Web server for the prediction of intrinsically unstructured regions of proteins based on estimated energy content. Bioinformatics21 (16), 3433–3434. 10.1093/bioinformatics/bti541
24
DosztányiZ.CsizmókV.TompaP.SimonI. (2005). The pairwise energy content estimated from amino acid composition discriminates between folded and intrinsically unstructured proteins. J. Mol. Biol.347 (4), 827–839. 10.1016/j.jmb.2005.01.071
25
DosztanyiZ.MeszarosB.SimonI. (2009). Anchor: Web server for predicting protein binding regions in disordered proteins. Bioinformatics25 (20), 2745–2746. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btp518
26
DubreuilB.MatalonO.LevyE. D. (2019). Protein abundance biases the amino acid composition of disordered regions to minimize non-functional interactions. J. Mol. Biol.431 (24), 4978–4992. 10.1016/j.jmb.2019.08.008
27
DysonH. J.WrightP. E. (2002). Coupling of folding and binding for unstructured proteins. Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol.12 (1), 54–60. 10.1016/S0959-440X(02)00289-0
28
EdgarR. C.BatzoglouS. (2006). Multiple sequence alignment. Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol.16 (3), 368–373. 10.1016/j.sbi.2006.04.004
29
EfimovA. V. (2017). Structural motifs in which β-strands are clipped together with the П-like module. Proteins85 (10), 1925–1930. 10.1002/prot.25346
30
FanR. E.ChangK. W.HsiehC. J.WangX. R.LinC. J. (2008). Liblinear: A library for large linear classification. J. Mach. Learn. Res.9, 1871–1874.
31
FanX.KurganL. (2013). Accurate prediction of disorder in protein chains with a comprehensive and empirically designed consensus. J. Biomol. Struct. Dyn.32 (3), 448–464. 10.1080/07391102.2013.775969
32
FangC.MoriwakiY.ZhuD.ShimizuK. (2018). “Identifying MoRFs in disordered proteins using enlarged conserved features,” in Proceedings of the 2018 6th international conference on bioinformatics and computational Biology (ACM). 10.1145/3194480.3198908
33
FangC.NoguchiT.TominagaD.YamanaH. (2013). MFSPSSMpred: Identifying short disorder-to-order binding regions in disordered proteins based on contextual local evolutionary conservation. BMC Bioinforma.14 (1). 10.1186/1471-2105-14-300
34
FangC.NoguchiT.YamanaH.SunF. (2016). “Identifying protein short linear motifs by position-specific scoring matrix,” in Advances in swarm intelligence. Editors TanY.ShiY.LiL. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 206–214. 10.1007/978-3-319-41009-8_22
35
FaraggiE.XueB.ZhouY. (2009). Improving the prediction accuracy of residue solvent accessibility and real-value backbone torsion angles of proteins by guided-learning through a two-layer neural network. Proteins74 (4), 847–856. 10.1002/prot.22193
36
FichóE.ReményiI.SimonI.MészárosB. (2017). Mfib: A repository of protein complexes with mutual folding induced by binding. Bioinformatics33 (22), 3682–3684. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btx486
37
FukuchiS.AmemiyaT.SakamotoS.NobeY.HosodaK.KadoY.et al (2013). IDEAL in 2014 illustrates interaction networks composed of intrinsically disordered proteins and their binding partners. Nucl. Acids Res.42 (D1), D320–D325. 10.1093/nar/gkt1010
38
FukuchiS.SakamotoS.NobeY.MurakamiS. D.AmemiyaT.HosodaK.et al (2011). Ideal: Intrinsically disordered proteins with extensive annotations and literature. Nucleic Acids Res.40 (D1), D507–D511. 10.1093/nar/gkr884
39
FuxreiterM.TompaP.SimonI. (2007). Local structural disorder imparts plasticity on linear motifs. Bioinformatics23 (8), 950–956. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm035
40
GarnierJ.GibratJ-F.RobsonB. (1996). [32] GOR method for predicting protein secondary structure from amino acid sequence. Methods Enzym., 540–553. Elsevier. 10.1016/s0076-6879(96)66034-0
41
GiriR.MorroneA.TotoA.BrunoriM.GianniS. (2013). Structure of the transition state for the binding of c-Myb and KIX highlights an unexpected order for a disordered system. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.110 (37), 14942–14947. 10.1073/pnas.1307337110
42
HamelryckT. (2005). An amino acid has two sides: A new 2D measure provides a different view of solvent exposure. Proteins59 (1), 38–48. 10.1002/prot.20379
43
HansonJ.PaliwalK.LitfinT.YangY.ZhouY. (2018). Improving prediction of protein secondary structure, backbone angles, solvent accessibility and contact numbers by using predicted contact maps and an ensemble of recurrent and residual convolutional neural networks. Bioinformatics35 (14), 2403–2410. 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty1006
44
HansonJ.PaliwalK. K.LitfinT.ZhouY. (2019). SPOT-Disorder2: Improved protein intrinsic disorder prediction by ensembled deep learning. Genomics, Proteomics Bioinforma.17 (6), 645–656. 10.1016/j.gpb.2019.01.004
45
HansonJ.YangY.PaliwalK.ZhouY. (2016). Improving protein disorder prediction by deep bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural networks. Bioinformatics. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw678
46
HeffernanR.PaliwalK.LyonsJ.DehzangiA.SharmaA.WangJ.et al (2015). Improving prediction of secondary structure, local backbone angles and solvent accessible surface area of proteins by iterative deep learning. Sci. Rep.5 (1). 10.1038/srep11476
47
HochreiterS.SchmidhuberJ. (1997). Long short-term memory. Neural Comput.9 (8), 1735–1780. 10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735
48
HouQ.De GeestP. F. G.GriffioenC. J.AbelnS.HeringaJ.FeenstraK. A. (2019). SeRenDIP: SEquential REmasteriNg to DerIve profiles for fast and accurate predictions of PPI interface positions. Bioinformatics35 (22), 4794–4796. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz428
49
HouQ.De GeestP. F. G.VrankenW. F.HeringaJ.FeenstraK. A. (2017). Seeing the trees through the forest: Sequence-based homo- and heteromeric protein-protein interaction sites prediction using random forest. Bioinformatics33 (10), btx005–1487. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btx005
50
HuG.KatuwawalaA.WangK.WuZ.GhadermarziS.GaoJ.et al (2021). flDPnn: Accurate intrinsic disorder prediction with putative propensities of disorder functions. Nat. Commun.12 (1). 10.1038/s41467-021-24773-7
51
JensenM. R.CommunieG.RibeiroE. A.MartinezN.DesfossesA.SalmonL.et al (2011). Intrinsic disorder in measles virus nucleocapsids. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.108 (24), 9839–9844. 10.1073/pnas.1103270108
52
JonesD. T.CozzettoD. (2014). DISOPRED3: Precise disordered region predictions with annotated protein-binding activity. Bioinformatics31 (6), 857–863. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu744
53
JonesD. T. (1999). Protein secondary structure prediction based on position-specific scoring matrices 1 1Edited by G. Von Heijne. J. Mol. Biol.292 (2), 195–202. 10.1006/jmbi.1999.3091
54
KatuwawalaA.GhadermarziS.KurganL. (2019a). Computational prediction of functions of intrinsically disordered regions. Prog. Mol. Biol. Transl. Sci., 341–369. 10.1016/bs.pmbts.2019.04.006
55
KatuwawalaA.PengZ.YangJ.KurganL. (2019b). Computational prediction of MoRFs, short disorder-to-order transitioning protein binding regions. Comput. Struct. Biotechnol. J.17, 454–462. 10.1016/j.csbj.2019.03.013
56
KawashimaS.PokarowskiP.PokarowskaM.KolinskiA.KatayamaT.KanehisaM. (2007). AAindex: Amino acid index database, progress report 2008. Nucleic Acids Res.36, D202–D205. 10.1093/nar/gkm998
57
KhanW.DuffyF.PollastriG.ShieldsD. C.MooneyC. (2013). Predicting binding within disordered protein regions to structurally characterised peptide-binding domains. PLOS ONE8 (9), e72838. 10.1371/journal.pone.0072838
58
KimD-H.HanK-H. (2021). Target-binding behavior of IDPs via pre-structured motifs. Prog. Mol. Biol. Transl. Sci.183, 187–247. 10.1016/bs.pmbts.2021.07.031
59
KumarM.MichaelS.Alvarado-ValverdeJ.MészárosB.Sámano-SánchezH.ZekeA.et al (2021). The eukaryotic linear motif resource: 2022 release. Nucleic Acids Res.50 (D1), D497–D508. 10.1093/nar/gkab975
60
KussieP. H.GorinaS.MarechalV.ElenbaasB.MoreauJ.LevineA. J.et al (1996). Structure of the MDM2 oncoprotein bound to the p53 tumor suppressor transactivation domain. Science274 (5289), 948–953. 10.1126/science.274.5289.948
61
LiR.RomeroP.MDunkerA. K.RaniM.ObradovicZ. (1999). Predicting protein disorder for N-, C-, and internal regions. Genome Inf. Ser. Workshop Genome Inf.10, 30–40.,
62
LinN.WuB.JansenR.GersteinM.ZhaoH. (2004). BMC Bioinforma.5 (1), 154. 10.1186/1471-2105-5-154
63
LindströmI.AnderssonE.DoganJ. (2018). The transition state structure for binding between TAZ1 of CBP and the disordered Hif-1α CAD. Sci. Rep.8 (1). 10.1038/s41598-018-26213-x
64
LiuJ.WangR. (2015). Classification of current scoring functions. J. Chem. Inf. Model.55 (3), 475–482. 10.1021/ci500731a
65
LobleyA.SwindellsM. B.OrengoC. A.JonesD. T. (2007). Inferring function using patterns of native disorder in proteins. PLoS Comput. Biol.3 (8), e162. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030162
66
LyonsJ.DehzangiA.HeffernanR.YangY.ZhouY.SharmaA.et al (2015). Advancing the accuracy of protein fold recognition by utilizing profiles from hidden Markov models. IEEE Trans.on Nanobioscience14 (7), 761–772. 10.1109/TNB.2015.2457906
67
MalhisN.GsponerJ. (2015). Computational identification of MoRFs in protein sequences. Bioinformatics31 (11), 1738–1744. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btv060
68
MalhisN.JacobsonM.GsponerJ. (2016). MoRFchibi SYSTEM: Software tools for the identification of MoRFs in protein sequences. Nucleic Acids Res.44 (W1), W488–W493. 10.1093/nar/gkw409
69
MalhisN.WongE. T. C.NassarR.GsponerJ. (2015). Computational identification of MoRFs in protein sequences using hierarchical application of Bayes rule. PLOS ONE10 (10), e0141603. 10.1371/journal.pone.0141603
70
McGuffinL. J. (2008). Intrinsic disorder prediction from the analysis of multiple protein fold recognition models. Bioinformatics24 (16), 1798–1804. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn326
71
MészárosB.ErdősG.DosztányiZ. (2018). IUPred2A: Context-dependent prediction of protein disorder as a function of redox state and protein binding. Nucleic Acids Res.46 (W1), W329–W337. 10.1093/nar/gky384
72
MészárosB.SimonI.DosztányiZ. (2009). Prediction of protein binding regions in disordered proteins. PLoS Comput. Biol.5 (5), e1000376. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000376
73
MészárosB.TompaP.SimonI.DosztányiZ. (2007). Molecular principles of the interactions of disordered proteins. J. Mol. Biol.372 (2), 549–561. 10.1016/j.jmb.2007.07.004
74
MinneciF.PiovesanD.CozzettoD.JonesD. T. (2013). FFPred 2.0: Improved homology-independent prediction of gene ontology terms for eukaryotic protein sequences. PLOS ONE8 (5), e63754. 10.1371/journal.pone.0063754
75
MiziantyM. J.StachW.ChenK.KedarisettiK. D.DisfaniF. M.KurganL. (2010). Improved sequence-based prediction of disordered regions with multilayer fusion of multiple information sources. Bioinformatics26 (18), i489–i496. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq373
76
MohanA.OldfieldC. J.RadivojacP.VacicV.CorteseM. S.DunkerA. K.et al (2006). Analysis of molecular recognition features (MoRFs). J. Mol. Biol.362 (5), 1043–1059. 10.1016/j.jmb.2006.07.087
77
MollicaL.BessaL. M.HanoulleX.JensenM. R.BlackledgeM.SchneiderR. (2016). Binding mechanisms of intrinsically disordered proteins: Theory, simulation, and experiment. Front. Mol. Biosci.3. 10.3389/fmolb.2016.00052
78
MonzonA. M.NecciM.QuagliaF.WalshI.ZanottiG.PiovesanD.et al (2020). Experimentally determined long intrinsically disordered protein regions are now abundant in the protein Data Bank. Ijms21 (12), 4496. 10.3390/ijms21124496
79
MooneyC.PollastriG.ShieldsD. C.HaslamN. J. (2012). Prediction of short linear protein binding regions. J. Mol. Biol.415 (1), 193–204. 10.1016/j.jmb.2011.10.025
80
MooneyC.VulloA.PollastriG. (2006). Protein structural motif prediction in multidimensional ø-ψ space leads to improved secondary structure prediction. J. Comput. Biol.13 (8), 1489–1502. 10.1089/cmb.2006.13.1489
81
OatesM. E.RomeroP.IshidaT.GhalwashM.MiziantyM. J.XueB.et al (2012). D2P2: Database of disordered protein predictions. Nucleic Acids Res.41 (D1), D508–D516. 10.1093/nar/gks1226
82
OldfieldC. J.ChengY.CorteseM. S.RomeroP.UverskyV. N.DunkerA. K. (2005). Coupled folding and binding with α-helix-forming molecular recognition elements. Biochemistry44 (37), 12454–12470. 10.1021/bi050736e
83
OldfieldC. J.UverskyV. N.KurganL. (2018). Predicting functions of disordered proteins with MoRFpred. Methods Mol. Biol., 337–352. 10.1007/978-1-4939-8736-8_19
84
PengK.RadivojacP.VuceticS.DunkerA. K.ObradovicZ. (2006). Length-dependent prediction of protein intrinsic disorder. BMC Bioinforma.7 (1). 10.1186/1471-2105-7-208
85
PengZ.KurganL. (2015). High-throughput prediction of RNA, DNA and protein binding regions mediated by intrinsic disorder. Nucleic Acids Res.43 (18), e121. 10.1093/nar/gkv585
86
PengZ.WangC.UverskyV. N.KurganL. (2016). Prediction of disordered RNA, DNA, and protein binding regions using DisoRDPbind. Methods Mol. Biol., 187–203. 10.1007/978-1-4939-6406-2_14
87
PiovesanD.NecciM.EscobedoN.MonzonA. M.HatosA.MičetićI.et al (2020). MobiDB: Intrinsically disordered proteins in 2021. Nucleic Acids Res.49 (D1), D361–D367. 10.1093/nar/gkaa1058
88
PollastriG.McLysaghtA. (2004). Porter: A new, accurate server for protein secondary structure prediction. Bioinformatics21 (8), 1719–1720. 10.1093/bioinformatics/bti203
89
QuagliaF.MészárosB.SalladiniE.HatosA.PancsaR.ChemesL. B.et al (2021). DisProt in 2022: Improved quality and accessibility of protein intrinsic disorder annotation. Nucleic Acids Res.50 (D1), D480–D487. 10.1093/nar/gkab1082
90
RadhakrishnanI.Pérez-AlvaradoG. C.ParkerD.DysonH. J.MontminyM. R.WrightP. E. (1997). Solution structure of the kix domain of CBP bound to the transactivation domain of CREB: A model for activator:coactivator interactions. Cell.91 (6), 741–752. 10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80463-8
91
RemmertM.BiegertA.HauserA.SödingJ. (2011). HHblits: Lightning-fast iterative protein sequence searching by HMM-HMM alignment. Nat. Methods9 (2), 173–175. 10.1038/nmeth.1818
92
RomeroP.ObradovicZ.LiX.GarnerE. C.BrownC. J.DunkerA. K. (2000). Sequence complexity of disordered protein. Proteins42 (1), 38–48. 10.1002/1097-0134(20010101)42:1<38::aid-prot50>3.0.co;2-3
93
RoyS.GhoshP.BandyopadhyayA.BasuS. (2022). Capturing a crucial ‘disorder-to-order transition’ at the heart of the coronavirus molecular pathology—triggered by highly persistent, interchangeable salt-bridges. Vaccines10 (2), 301. 10.3390/vaccines10020301
94
SazliM. (2006). A brief review of feed-forward neural networks. Commun. Fac. Sci. Univ. Ankara50, 11–17. 10.1501/0003168
95
SchadE.FichóE.PancsaR.SimonI.DosztányiZ.MészárosB. (2017). Dibs: A repository of disordered binding sites mediating interactions with ordered proteins. BIOINFORMATICS34 (3), 535–537. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btx640
96
SchlessingerA.YachdavG.RostB. (2006). PROFbval: Predict flexible and rigid residues in proteins. Bioinformatics22 (7), 891–893. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btl032
97
SchusterM.PaliwalK. K. (1997). Bidirectional recurrent neural networks. IEEE Trans. Signal Process.45 (11), 2673–2681. 10.1109/78.650093
98
SharmaA.LyonsJ.DehzangiA.PaliwalK. K. (2013). A feature extraction technique using bi-gram probabilities of position specific scoring matrix for protein fold recognition. J. Theor. Biol.320, 41–46. 10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.12.008
99
SharmaR.BayarjargalM.TsunodaT.PatilA.SharmaA. (2018a). MoRFPred-plus: Computational identification of MoRFs in protein sequences using physicochemical properties and HMM profiles. J. Theor. Biol.437, 9–16. 10.1016/j.jtbi.2017.10.015
100
SharmaR.KumarS.TsunodaT.PatilA.SharmaA. (2016). Predicting MoRFs in protein sequences using HMM profiles. BMC Bioinforma.17 (S19). 10.1186/s12859-016-1375-0
101
SharmaR.RaicarG.TsunodaT.PatilA.SharmaA. (2018b). Opal: Prediction of MoRF regions in intrinsically disordered protein sequences. Bioinformatics34 (11), 1850–1858. 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty032
102
SharmaR.SharmaA.PatilA.TsunodaT. (2019). Discovering MoRFs by trisecting intrinsically disordered protein sequence into terminals and middle regions. BMC Bioinforma.19 (S13). 10.1186/s12859-018-2396-7
103
SharmaR.SharmaA.RaicarG.TsunodaT.PatilA. (2018c). OPAL+: Length‐Specific MoRF prediction in intrinsically disordered protein sequences. PROTEOMICS19 (6), 1800058. 10.1002/pmic.201800058
104
SickmeierM.HamiltonJ. A.LeGallT.VacicV.CorteseM. S.TantosA.et al (2007). DisProt: The database of disordered proteins. Nucleic Acids Res.35, D786–D793. 10.1093/nar/gkl893
105
SinghA.DargarS. K.GuptaA.KumarA.SrivastavaA. K.SrivastavaM.et al (2022). Evolving long short-term memory network-based text classification. Comput. Intell. Neurosci.2022, 1–11. 10.1155/2022/4725639
106
ThompsonJ. D.HigginsD. G.GibsonT. J. (1994). Clustal W: Improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucl. Acids Res.22 (22), 4673–4680. 10.1093/nar/22.22.4673
107
TsabanT.VargaJ. K.AvrahamO.Ben-AharonZ.KhramushinA.Schueler-FurmanO. (2022). Harnessing protein folding neural networks for peptide-protein docking. Nat. Commun.13 (1). 10.1038/s41467-021-27838-9
108
UverskyV. N.DunkerA. K. (2010). Understanding protein non-folding. Biochimica Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Proteins Proteomics1804 (6), 1231–1264. 10.1016/j.bbapap.2010.01.017
109
UverskyV. N. (2018). Functions of short lifetime biological structures at large: The case of intrinsically disordered proteins. Briefings Funct. Genomics. 10.1093/bfgp/ely02310.1093/bfgp/ely023
110
UverskyV. N.OldfieldC. J.DunkerA. K. (2008). Intrinsically disordered proteins in human diseases: Introducing the D2 concept. Annu. Rev. Biophys.37 (1), 215–246. 10.1146/annurev.biophys.37.032807.125924
111
UverskyV. N.OldfieldC. J.DunkerA. K. (2005). Showing your ID: Intrinsic disorder as an ID for recognition, regulation and cell signaling. J. Mol. Recognit.18 (5), 343–384. 10.1002/jmr.747
112
UverskyV. N. (2013). Unusual biophysics of intrinsically disordered proteins. Biochimica Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Proteins Proteomics1834 (5), 932–951. 10.1016/j.bbapap.2012.12.008
113
WalshI.MartinA. J. M.Di DomenicoT.TosattoS. C. E. (2011). ESpritz: Accurate and fast prediction of protein disorder. Bioinformatics28 (4), 503–509. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btr682
114
WangK.SamudralaR. (2006). Incorporating background frequency improves entropy-based residue conservation measures. BMC Bioinforma.7 (1). 10.1186/1471-2105-7-385
115
WangY.GuoY.PuX.LiM. (2017). A sequence-based computational method for prediction of MoRFs. RSC Adv.7 (31), 18937–18945. 10.1039/c6ra27161h
116
WardJ. J.SodhiJ. S.McGuffinL. J.BuxtonB. F.JonesD. T. (2004). Prediction and functional analysis of native disorder in proteins from the three kingdoms of life. J. Mol. Biol.337 (3), 635–645. 10.1016/j.jmb.2004.02.002
117
WeatherittR. J.GibsonT. J. (2012). Linear motifs: Lost in (pre)translation. Trends Biochem. Sci.37 (8), 333–341. 10.1016/j.tibs.2012.05.001
118
WilsonC. J.ChoyW-Y.KarttunenM. (2022). AlphaFold2: A role for disordered protein/region prediction?Ijms23 (9), 4591. 10.3390/ijms23094591
119
WongE. T. C.GsponerJ. (2019a). Predicting protein-protein interfaces that bind intrinsically disordered protein regions. J. Mol. Biol.431 (17), 3157–3178. 10.1016/j.jmb.2019.06.010
120
WongE. T. C.GsponerJ. (2019b). Predicting protein-protein interfaces that bind intrinsically disordered protein regions. J. Mol. Biol.431 (17), 3157–3178. 10.1016/j.jmb.2019.06.010
121
XuD.ZhangY. (2009). Generating triangulated macromolecular surfaces by euclidean distance transform. PLOS ONE4 (12), e8140. 10.1371/journal.pone.0008140
122
XueB.DunbrackR. L.WilliamsR. W.DunkerA. K.UverskyV. N. (2010a). PONDR-FIT: A meta-predictor of intrinsically disordered amino acids. Biochimica Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Proteins Proteomics1804 (4), 996–1010. 10.1016/j.bbapap.2010.01.011
123
XueB.DunkerA. K.UverskyV. N. (2010b). Retro-MoRFs: Identifying protein binding sites by normal and reverse alignment and intrinsic disorder prediction. Ijms11 (10), 3725–3747. 10.3390/ijms11103725
124
YanJ.DunkerA. K.UverskyV. N.KurganL. (2016). Molecular recognition features (MoRFs) in three domains of life. Mol. Biosyst.12 (3), 697–710. 10.1039/c5mb00640f
125
YuanZ. (2005). Better prediction of protein contact number using a support vector regression analysis of amino acid sequence. BMC Bioinforma.6 (1). 10.1186/1471-2105-6-248
126
ZellA. (1994). Simulation neuronaler netze. Bonn: Addison-Wesley.
127
ZhangF.ZhaoB.ShiW.LiM.KurganL. (2021). DeepDISOBind: Accurate prediction of RNA-, DNA- and protein-binding intrinsically disordered residues with deep multi-task learning. Briefings Bioinforma.23 (1). 10.1093/bib/bbab521
128
ZhangJ.GhadermarziS.KurganL. (2020). Prediction of protein-binding residues: Dichotomy of sequence-based methods developed using structured complexes versus disordered proteins. BIOINFORMATICS36 (18), 4729–4738. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa573
129
ZhangT.FaraggiE.LiZ.ZhouY. (2013). Intrinsically semi-disordered state and its role in induced folding and protein aggregation. Cell. Biochem. Biophys.67 (3), 1193–1205. 10.1007/s12013-013-9638-0
130
ZhangT.FaraggiE.XueB.DunkerA. K.UverskyV. N.ZhouY. (2012). SPINE-D: Accurate prediction of short and long disordered regions by a single neural-network based method. J. Biomol. Struct. Dyn.29 (4), 799–813. 10.1080/073911012010525022
131
ZhouP.LugovskoyA. A.McCartyJ. S.LiP.WagnerG. (2001). Solution structure of DFF40 and DFF45 N-terminal domain complex and mutual chaperone activity of DFF40 and DFF45. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.98 (11), 6051–6055. 10.1073/pnas.111145098
Summary
Keywords
intrinsically disordered protein (IDP), protein interaction sites prediction, machine learning, ML, protein functions, protein sequence
Citation
Chen R, Li X, Yang Y, Song X, Wang C and Qiao D (2022) Prediction of protein-protein interaction sites in intrinsically disordered proteins. Front. Mol. Biosci. 9:985022. doi: 10.3389/fmolb.2022.985022
Received
03 July 2022
Accepted
27 July 2022
Published
30 September 2022
Volume
9 - 2022
Edited by
Sankar Basu, University of Calcutta, India
Reviewed by
Hitesh Kumar Waghwani, Affinivax Inc., United States
Gopinath Chattopadhyay, Indian Institute of Science, India
Updates

Check for updates
Copyright
© 2022 Chen, Li, Yang, Song, Wang and Qiao.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Cheng Wang, chengwang@sdu.edu.cn; Dongdong Qiao, qiaochina74@126.com
† These authors have contributed equally to this work
This article was submitted to Structural Biology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.