title: A nearest neighbor approach for automated transporter prediction and categorization from protein sequences.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Membrane transport proteins play a crucial role in the import and export of ions, small molecules or macromolecules across biological membranes. Currently, there are a limited number of published computational tools which enable the systematic discovery and categorization of transporters prior to costly experimental validation. To approach this problem, we utilized a nearest neighbor method which seamlessly integrates homologous search and topological analysis into a machine-learning framework.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Our approach satisfactorily distinguished 484 transporter families in the Transporter Classification Database, a curated and representative database for transporters. A five-fold cross-validation on the database achieved a positive classification rate of 72.3% on average. Furthermore, this method successfully detected transporters in seven model and four non-model organisms, ranging from archaean to mammalian species. A preliminary literature-based validation has cross-validated 65.8% of our predictions on the 11 organisms, including 55.9% of our predictions overlapping with 83.6% of the predicted transporters in TransportDB.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Lab, Plant Biology Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Inc., 2510 Sam Noble Parkway, Ardmore, OK 73401, USA.
authors.forename: Haiquan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Xinbin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Dai
authors.forename: Xuechun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003628:Database Management Systems; D030562:Databases, Protein; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D026901:Membrane Transport Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000145:classification; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D026901:Membrane Transport Proteins; D011506:Proteins