An Alignment-Free Algorithm in Comparing the Similarity of Protein Sequences Based on Pseudo-Markov Transition Probabilities among Amino Acids

PLoS One. 2016 Dec 5;11(12):e0167430. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0167430. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

In this paper, we have proposed a novel alignment-free method for comparing the similarity of protein sequences. We first encode a protein sequence into a 440 dimensional feature vector consisting of a 400 dimensional Pseudo-Markov transition probability vector among the 20 amino acids, a 20 dimensional content ratio vector, and a 20 dimensional position ratio vector of the amino acids in the sequence. By evaluating the Euclidean distances among the representing vectors, we compare the similarity of protein sequences. We then apply this method into the ND5 dataset consisting of the ND5 protein sequences of 9 species, and the F10 and G11 datasets representing two of the xylanases containing glycoside hydrolase families, i.e., families 10 and 11. As a result, our method achieves a correlation coefficient of 0.962 with the canonical protein sequence aligner ClustalW in the ND5 dataset, much higher than those of other 5 popular alignment-free methods. In addition, we successfully separate the xylanases sequences in the F10 family and the G11 family and illustrate that the F10 family is more heat stable than the G11 family, consistent with a few previous studies. Moreover, we prove mathematically an identity equation involving the Pseudo-Markov transition probability vector and the amino acids content ratio vector.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Amino Acids / chemistry*
  • Glycoside Hydrolases / chemistry
  • Probability
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Sequence Alignment / methods
  • Sequence Analysis, Protein / methods

Substances

  • Amino Acids
  • Proteins
  • Glycoside Hydrolases

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11201409 to YL), the Young Talents Plan of Higher School in Hebei Province (No. BJ2014060 to YL) and the National Science Foundation of China (No 11171088 to YZ), the Science and technology project of Hebei Province (No A2015208108 and No 1520341 to YZ), the Science Fund of the Hebei University of Science and Technology Foundation (No 2014PT67 to YZ), the Hebei Province Foundation for Advanced Talents (No A201400121 to YZ), the Educational Commission of Hebei Province on of Humanities and Social Sciences(No SZ16180 to YZ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.