Prediction of presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins by combining various Chou’s pseudo components

Abstract

Presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins are two groups of neurotoxins. Identification of presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins is an important work for numerous newly found toxins. It is both costly and time consuming to determine these two neurotoxins by experimental methods. As a complement, using computational methods for predicting presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins could provide some useful information in a timely manner. In this study, we described four algorithms for predicting presynaptic and postsynaptic neurotoxins from sequence driven features by using Increment of Diversity (ID), Multinomial Naive Bayes Classifier (MNBC), Random Forest (RF), and K-nearest Neighbours Classifier (IBK). Each protein sequence was encoded by pseudo amino acid (PseAA) compositions and three biological motif features, including MEME, Prosite and InterPro motif features. The Maximum Relevance Minimum Redundancy (MRMR) feature selection method was used to rank the PseAA compositions and the 50 top ranked features were selected to improve the prediction accuracy. The PseAA compositions and three kinds of biological motif features were combined and 12 different parameters that defined as P1-P12 were selected as the input parameters of ID, MNBC, RF, and IBK. The prediction results obtained in this study were significantly better than those of previously developed methods.