title: Conotoxin protein classification using free scores of words and support vector machines.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Conotoxin has been proven to be effective in drug design and could be used to treat various disorders such as schizophrenia, neuromuscular disorders and chronic pain. With the rapidly growing interest in conotoxin, accurate conotoxin superfamily classification tools are desirable to systematize the increasing number of newly discovered sequences and structures. However, despite the significance and extensive experimental investigations on conotoxin, those tools have not been intensively explored.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this paper, we propose to consider suboptimal alignments of words with restricted length. We developed a scoring system based on local alignment partition functions, called free score. The scoring system plays the key role in the feature extraction step of support vector machine classification. In the classification of conotoxin proteins, our method, SVM-Freescore, features an improved sensitivity and specificity by approximately 5.864% and 3.76%, respectively, over previously reported methods. For the generalization purpose, SVM-Freescore was also applied to classify superfamilies from curated and high quality database such as ConoServer. The average computed sensitivity and specificity for the superfamily classification were found to be 0.9742 and 0.9917, respectively.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The SVM-Freescore method is shown to be a useful sequence-based analysis tool for functional and structural characterization of conotoxin proteins. The datasets and the software are available at http://faculty.uaeu.ac.ae/nzaki/SVM-Freescore.htm.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Information Technology, UAE University, 17551 Al-Ain, UAE. nzaki@uaeu.ac.ae
authors.forename: Nazar
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zaki
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wolfsheimer
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nuel
authors.forename: Sawsan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Khuri
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D020916:Conotoxins / Q000032:analysis / Q000145:classification*; D052078:Conus Snail / Q000737:chemistry*; D009479:Neuropeptides / Q000032:analysis / Q000145:classification*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D020916:Conotoxins; D009479:Neuropeptides